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Saturday, May 31, 2008

Spiked? Pelosi Says Iranians, Not Troops, Make Surge Success

The Vanguard of the Proletariat seem to be stuck in a time warp. We are forever losing in Iraq, no matter what happens in reality ... it's always 2006.

Conservative talk radio is covering Nancy Pelosi remarks that the liberal media would probably rather avoid. Mark Levin on Thursday night and Laura Ingraham on Friday morning both seized on this tidbit from Commentary magazine's Contentions blog. Deep in an interview the House Speaker granted to the editorial board of the hometown San Francisco Chronicle, Abe Greenwald found this eyebrow-raising passage:

Well, the purpose of the surge was to provide a secure space, a time for the political change to occur to accomplish the reconciliation. That didn’t happen. Whatever the military success, and progress that may have been made, the surge didn’t accomplish its goal. And some of the success of the surge is that the goodwill of the Iranians -- they decided in Basra when the fighting would end, they negotiated that cessation of hostilities -- the Iranians.

Exclusive: McClellan pitch softer on Bush

I have not read the book and don't intend to, but it appears that that pitch and the book are unrelated.

Killing Her Softly. Hillary Clinton and the contradictions of the West.

By Mark Steyn

‘Someone wins, someone doesn’t win, that’s life,” Nancy Kopp, Maryland’s treasurer, told the Washington Post. “But women don’t want to be totally dissed.” She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Clinton. Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. “Healing The Wounds Of Democrats’ Sexism,” as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Senator Clinton’s presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism. How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver’s license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neo-segregationist racebaiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates. “On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today…”

Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, Illinois, many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.


Read the rest...

Hillary Runs Into Obama

Obama VS. David Axelrod on the surge

You have to wonder how long BS will keep Obama upright.

Lying with a straight face is one of his greatest accomplishments.

Friday, May 30, 2008

An Open Letter from Obama Supporters to Islam: Please Come and Kill More of Us.


TO: ISLAM
FROM: AMERICANS UNITED FOR OBAMA
RE: KILLING US SOME MORE

DEAR ISLAM,
You may have asked yourselves if, with the rise of Barack Hussein Obama, we American supporters of the candidate of the millennium are impatient with you. Yes, it's true. You are not fulfilling our desires which we believe we have made clear with our worship of Obama. Let's be clear about one thing, as supporters of Obama we thirst for death.

We would like you, at your earliest opportunity, to expunge our guilt - especially that of the whitest and therefore most guilty among us - by slaughtering us wholesale.

Just as you hate us for what we are so we hate ourselves for who we are. We have so much while you, the petulant children of a whacked-out god, oppressed by your own ratty cultures and fascist governments and unable to contribute anything to civilization for over 500 years, have so little except your "trauma." Because of this we feel it is only fair that you get to kill more of us at will.

AsObama-Americans we have a problem with our self-esteem in this country, and that problem is that you are not killing enough of us quickly enough. Especially if we support Obama. You don't think we're working for him for our health, or even our health-plan, do you?

We don't ask for much in this regard. We only ask that should we succeed in electing Obama, you plan our deaths more carefully and thoroughly. We note that, during the unfortunate events of the 11th, only a few of our children were killed by you. They died because they just happened to be on our airplanes that you borrowed for the day.


Read the rest.

W VS. TERROR: SOMETHING'S WORKING

IT'S an article of faith on the left that the Bush administra tion has done nothing that has enhanced our security - rather, its alleged blunders have only contributed to the number of jihadists who want to attack us.

Empirically, however, something clearly has made us safer since 2001. Successful attacks on the United States and its interests overseas have not increased, as had been widely predicted, but instead dwindled to virtually nothing.

A steady stream of terrorist attacks on America and US interests abroad were launched from the 1980s forward. A partial history:


Read the rest.

Harvey Korman, dead at 81.

Darn.

Here are some funny sketches


and

Sex and Eugene Volokh

The Volokh conspiracy is a blog with a focus on things legal. Eugene Volokh is a law professor at UCLA. And as cases involving sex are litigated, he and his cohorts comment on them, frequently citing the law and linking to the actual decisions handed down.

Eugene appears to be of a Libertarian bent and favors homosexual marriage. This is not too surprising since I believe, but can’t prove, that most academics do. To take a position otherwise would appear to be discriminatory and is certainly not in keeping with the evolution of our “living constitution.”

In this context, it is fascinating to see discussions of the controversy surrounding the Texas FLDS litigation. For those who have not been following this is a recent case in which Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) raided a ranch (Yearning for Zion Ranch) run by a polygamous group known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Over 400 children were taken from their mothers and farmed out to foster homes based on the theory that they were in imminent danger.

A lower court agreed, an appeals court disagreed and the Texas Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court and ordered the children back to their parents.

Here is the part that I find interesting. Modern Liberalism demands that we get our noses out of other people’s bedrooms. It demands that we approve of homosexual practices and that we give our approval to homosexual marriages. But it has a visceral, prudish reaction to certain other sexual practices, demanding that – for example – people who approve of the marriage of teen aged girls to much older men be prosecuted.

Go back in time, not more than a few hundred years, and the sexual habits and morals of the day were the exact opposite. Homosexual practices were banned while marriages were frequently arranged between young girls and much older men and no one thought anything of it.

Things have changed since then, of course. We have the automobile, jet plane, the computer and indoor plumbing for the masses. But human morality has not evolved with the same speed and in the same direction as technology. If the courts find that it is required of the constitution that John and Bill should be allowed to marry, why do those who believe this, not only from a moral perspective but from a legal one, stop short of Frank marrying Jill, Mary, Elsie and Sophie?

What is it about the number “2” that creates a constitutional block to the latter marriage arrangement? I ask this in all sincerity since there is no doubt that the laws regarding sexual couplings and marriages are in a state of flux.

I can understand that people, having achieved their solitary objective of mainstreaming their personal sexual preferences now wish to stop all development and not extend new “rights” to less favored groups. But I would think that as a discussion of law and philosophy, such parochial considerations would be put aside.

I invite Professor Volokh to consider an answer.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Obama and his church

Not content with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama has other ministers at Trinity United Church who deliver racist rants as sermons to a cheering congregation.



And this;



I will let others take issue with Father Michael Pfleger. At this point it matters little who the cast of characters are who spout racist, anti-Semitic hatred of America and its people. What is most disturbing is the audience reaction. I say “audience” because the people listening to these “sermons” are in no way a church congregation; they are an audience listening to a speaker they heartily agree with. They cry out, their stand up , they cheer and applaud. We have not had such enthusiasm since the Nuremburg rallies of the 1930s to similar rants by other madmen.

And this is the audience in that Obama has been part of for two decades. This is the audience his wife and children were part of and in which he found inspiration. These are the rants and cheers he finds congenial and from which he draws his spiritual waters.

Obama is the well dressed, well spoken, clean front for the people who laugh and applaud rancid racism and bigotry and who cheer hatred of America.

Forget the speaker, look at the audience.

Thank, I’ve heard enough.

Court orders return of sect children to parents

Well, that was fast.

I would have thought that the law would wend its leisurely way for at least weeks if not months; that the children might see their parents again for their college graduations or weddings. But like a bolt of lighting the Texas Supremes ruled that the children from the Yearning For Zion Ranch have to be returned to their parents … now.


SAN ANTONIO - In a crushing blow to the state's massive seizure of children from a polygamist sect's ranch, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that child welfare officials overstepped their authority and the children should go back to their parents.
The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago.
"On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted," the justices said in their ruling issued in Austin.

The speed with which this case was decided may be an indication of how weak the case brought by the CPS was. It will be interesting to see if someone is made to pay for this fiasco or whether there will be the usual bureaucratic CYA and the CPS workers circle the wagons.

In a related development, the Texas Rangers may have found the person who perpetrated this outrage with a hoax phone call. The perp, who is under investigation for other hoax calls appears to be Rozita Swinton, 33, of Colorado Springs. She has made other phone calls pretending to be a teen aged girl being abused either by her father and her pastor.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - A woman suspected of making false abuse claims in Colorado used a telephone number that was later used to report alleged abuse at a polygamist retreat in Texas, according to an affidavit made public Wednesday.

Swinton was arrested April 16 and later released on a misdemeanor charge of false reporting in a February case in Colorado Springs with no known ties to the raid in west Texas.
She's accused of posing as a teenager named "Jennifer" and falsely claiming in a 911 call that her father had locked her in her basement for days, the arrest warrant affidavit released Wednesday said.
Swinton pleaded guilty to misdemeanor false reporting in a 2005 case out of Castle Rock, Colo.; a one-year sentence was deferred. She had claimed in phone calls to be a 16-year-old named Jessica who was suicidal after giving birth; there was no baby.
"The investigator ... was surprised at her age because she sounded like someone who was in her mid- to late teens even though she was 30," Castle Rock police Lt. Douglas Ernst said.…

The warrant also links Swinton to calls made throughout October from a "Dana Anderson." The caller claimed to be a young woman being abused by her pastor at Colorado Springs' New Life Church, and later as a 13-year-old student at Liberty High School who said she was being drugged and sexually abused by her father.
New Life Church is incidentally the church in which a deranged gunman killed one and wounded four before being killed himself. It appears that his church is the subject of quite a bit of hatred by militant atheists.

But back to Swinton, these kind of accusations can have a devastating effect on the person being accused, since the assumption is made that no one would fake this. Decades ago, this kind of thing sent day care workers to jail for years. This one almost led to the destruction of hundreds of families and their children.

If Swinton is the hoaxer, she deserves a long, long prison sentence.

American Troops


SUPPORT THE TROOPS

YOU CAN'T APPEASE EVERYBODY

Good column by Ann Coulter. When Obama says he will "talk" with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, what will his bargaining chips be? What is he prepared to give and what is he prepared to get?

I like this part:
There is no possible result of such a meeting apart from appeasement and humiliation of the U.S. If we are prepared to talk, then we're looking for a deal. What kind of deal do you make with a madman until he is ready to surrender?

Will President Obama listen respectfully as Ahmadinejad says he plans to build nuclear weapons? Will he say he'll get back to Ahmadinejad on removing all U.S. troops from the region? Will he nod his head as Ahmadinejad demands the removal of the Jewish population from the Middle East? Obama says he's prepared to have an open-ended chat with Ahmadinejad, so I guess everything is on the table.

Perhaps in the spirit of compromise, Obama could agree to let Iran push only half of Israel into the sea. That would certainly constitute "change"! Obama could give one of those upbeat speeches of his, saying: As a result of my recent talks with President Ahmadinejad, some see the state of Israel as being half empty. I prefer to see it as half full. And then Obama can return and tell Americans he could no more repudiate Ahmadinejad than he could repudiate his own white grandmother. It will make Chris Matthews' leg tingle.


The whole column is below.

After decades of comparing Nixon to Hitler, Reagan to Hitler and Bush to Hitler, liberals have finally decided it is wrong to make comparisons to Hitler. But the only leader to whom they have applied their newfound rule of thumb is: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While Ahmadinejad has not done anything as starkly evil as cut the capital gains tax, he does deny the Holocaust, call for the destruction of Israel, deny the existence of gays in Iran and refuses to abandon his nuclear program despite protests from the United Nations. That's the only world leader we're not allowed to compare to Hitler.

President Bush's speech at the Knesset two weeks ago was somewhat more nuanced than liberals' Hitler arguments. He did not simply jump up and down chanting: "Ahmadinejad is Hitler!" Instead, Bush condemned a policy of appeasement toward madmen, citing Neville Chamberlain's ill-fated talks with Adolf Hitler.

Suspiciously, Bush's speech was interpreted as a direct hit on B. Hussein Obama's foreign policy -- and that's according to Obama's supporters.

So to defend Obama, who -- according to his supporters -- favors appeasing madmen, liberals expanded the rule against ad Hitlerum arguments to cover any mention of the events leading to World War II. A ban on "You're like Hitler" arguments has become liberals' latest excuse to ignore history.

Unless, of course, it is liberals using historical examples to support Obama's admitted policy of appeasing dangerous lunatics. It's a strange one-sided argument when they can cite Nixon going to China and Reagan meeting with Gorbachev, but we can't cite Chamberlain meeting with Hitler.

There are reasons to meet with a tyrant, but none apply to Ahmadinejad. We're not looking for an imperfect ally against some other dictatorship, as Nixon was with China. And we aren't in a Mexican stand-off with a nuclear power, as Reagan was with the USSR. At least not yet.

Mutually Assured Destruction was bad enough with the Evil Empire, but something you definitely want to avoid with lunatics who are willing to commit suicide in order to destroy the enemies of Islam. As with the H-word, our sole objective with Ahmadinejad is to prevent him from becoming a military power.

What possible reason is there to meet with Ahmadinejad? To win a $20 bar bet as to whether or not the man actually owns a necktie?

We know his position and he knows ours. He wants nuclear arms, American troops out of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel. We don't want that. (This is assuming Mike Gravel doesn't pull off a major upset this November.) We don't need him as an ally against some other more dangerous dictator because ... well, there aren't any.

Does Obama imagine he will make demands of Ahmadinejad? Using what stick as leverage, pray tell? A U.S. boycott of the next Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran? The U.N. has already demanded that Iran give up its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad has ignored the U.N. and that's the end of it.

We always have the ability to "talk" to Ahmadinejad if we have something to say. Bush has a telephone. If Iranian crop dusters were headed toward one of our nuclear power plants, I am quite certain that Bush would be able to reach Ahmadinejad to tell him that Iran will be flattened unless the planes retreat. If his cell phone died, Bush could just post a quick warning on the Huffington Post.

Liberals view talk as an end in itself. They never think through how these talks will proceed, which is why Chamberlain ended up giving away Czechoslovakia. He didn't leave for Munich planning to do that. It is simply the inevitable result of talking with madmen without a clear and obtainable goal. Without a stick, there's only a carrot.

The only explanation for liberals' hysterical zealotry in favor of Obama's proposed open-ended talks with Ahmadinejad is that they seriously imagine crazy foreign dictators will be as charmed by Obama as cable TV hosts whose legs tingle when they listen to Obama (a condition that used to be known as "sciatica").

Because, really, who better to face down a Holocaust denier with a messianic complex than the guy who is afraid of a debate moderated by Brit Hume?

There is no possible result of such a meeting apart from appeasement and humiliation of the U.S. If we are prepared to talk, then we're looking for a deal. What kind of deal do you make with a madman until he is ready to surrender?

Will President Obama listen respectfully as Ahmadinejad says he plans to build nuclear weapons? Will he say he'll get back to Ahmadinejad on removing all U.S. troops from the region? Will he nod his head as Ahmadinejad demands the removal of the Jewish population from the Middle East? Obama says he's prepared to have an open-ended chat with Ahmadinejad, so I guess everything is on the table.

Perhaps in the spirit of compromise, Obama could agree to let Iran push only half of Israel into the sea. That would certainly constitute "change"! Obama could give one of those upbeat speeches of his, saying: As a result of my recent talks with President Ahmadinejad, some see the state of Israel as being half empty. I prefer to see it as half full. And then Obama can return and tell Americans he could no more repudiate Ahmadinejad than he could repudiate his own white grandmother. It will make Chris Matthews' leg tingle.

There is a third reason to talk to dictators, in addition to seeking an ally or as part of a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Gen. Douglas C. MacArthur talked with Japanese imperial forces on Sept. 2, 1945. There was a long ceremony aboard the USS Missouri with full press coverage and a lot of talk. It was a regular international confab!

It also took place after we had dropped two nukes on Japan and MacArthur was officially accepting Japan's surrender. If Obama plans to drop nukes on Ahmadinejad prior to their little chat-fest, I'm all for it. But I don't think that's what liberals have in mind
.

Obama's Marxist Connections

From Discover the Networks

The "New Party" was a Marxist political organization. Barack Obama sought their support in 1995 in his run for the Illinois Senate. He got it and was elected.

What is the New Party?

Marxist political coalition
Was active from 1992-1998
Endorsed Barack Obama for Illinois state senate seat in 1996


Co-founded in 1992 by Daniel Cantor (a former staffer for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign) and Joel Rogers (a sociology and law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the New Party was a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials -- most often Democrats. The New Party's short-term objective was to move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of new Marxist third party.

Most New Party members hailed from the Democratic Socialists of America and the militant organization ACORN. The party's Chicago chapter also included a large contingent from the Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members.

The New Party's modus operandi included the political strategy of "electoral fusion," where it would nominate, for various political offices, candidates from other parties (usually Democrats), thereby enabling each of those candidates to occupy more than one ballot line in the voting booth. By so doing, the New Party often was able to influence candidates' platforms. (Fusion of this type is permitted in seven states -- Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, South Carolina, and Vermont -- but is common only in New York.)

Though Illinois was not one of the states that permitted electoral fusion, in 1995 Barack Obama nonetheless sought the New Party's endorsement for his 1996 state senate run. He was successful in obtaining that endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.

In 1996, three of the four candidates endorsed by the New Party won their electoral primaries. The three victors included Barack Obama (in the 13th State Senate District), Danny Davis (in the 7th Congressional District), and Patricia Martin, who won the race for Judge in the 7th Subcircuit Court. All four candidates attended an April 11, 1996 New Party membership meeting to express their gratitude for the party's support.

The New Party's various chapters similarly helped to elect dozens of other political candidates in a host of American cities.

One of the more notable New Party members was Carl Davidson, a Chicago-based Marxist who became a political supporter of Barack Obama in the mid-1990s.


Any buyers remorse out there?

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Uses and Abuses of PMS

From Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler

This is an actual letter from an Austin woman sent to American company Proctor and Gamble regarding their feminine products.

She really gets rolling after the first paragraph. It’s PC Magazine’s 2007 editors’ choice for best webmail-award-winning letter.

Dear Mr. Thatcher,
I have been a loyal user of your ‘Always’ maxi pads for over 20 years and I appreciate many of their features. Why, without the LeakGuard Core or Dri-Weave absorbency, I’d probably never go horseback riding or salsa dancing, and I’d certainly steer clear of running up and down the beach in tight, white shorts. But my favorite feature has to be your revolutionary Flexi-Wings. Kudos on being the only company smart enough to realize how crucial it is that maxi pads be aerodynamic. I can’t tell you how safe and secure I feel each month knowing there’s a little F-16 in my pants.

Have you ever had a menstrual period, Mr. Thatcher? Ever suffered from the curse’? I’m guessing you haven’t. Well, my time of the month is starting right now. As I type, I can already feel hormonal forces violently surging through my body. Just a few minutes from now, my body will adjust and I’ll be transformed into what my husband likes to call ‘an inbred hillbilly with knife skills.’ Isn’t the human body amazing?

As Brand Manager in the Feminine-Hygiene Division, you’ve no doubt seen quite a bit of research on what exactly happens during your customer’s monthly visits from ‘Aunt Flo’. Therefore, you must know about the bloating, puffiness, and cramping we endure, and about our intense mood swings, crying jags, and out-of-control behavior. You surely realize it’s a tough time for most women. In fact, only last week, my friend Jennifer fought the violent urge to shove her boyfriend’s testicles into a George
Foreman Grill just because he told her he thought Grey’s Anatomy was written by drunken chimps.Crazy!

The point is, sir, you of all people must realize that America is just crawling with homicidal maniacs in Capri pants… Which brings me to the reason for my letter. Last month, while in the throes of cramping so painful I wanted to reach inside my body and yank out my uterus, I opened an Always maxi-pad, and there, printed on the adhesive backing, were these words: ‘Have a Happy Period.’

Are you f—— kidding me? What I mean is, does any part of your tiny middle-manager brain really think happiness - actual smiling, laughing happiness, is possible during a menstrual period? Did anything mentioned above sound the least bit pleasurable? Well, did it, James? FYI, unless you’re some kind of sick S&M freak, there will never be anything ‘happy’ about a day in which you have to jack yourself up on Motrin and Kahlua and lock yourself in your house just so you don’t march down to the local Walgreen’s armed with a hunting rifle and a sketchy plan to end your life in a blaze of glory.For the love of G-d, pull your head out, man! If you have to slap a moronic message on a maxi pad, wouldn’t it make more sense to say something that’s actually pertinent, like ‘Put down the Hammer’ or ‘Vehicular Manslaughter is Wrong’, or are you just picking on us?

Sir, please inform your Accounting Department that, effective immediately, there will be an $8 drop in monthly profits, for I have chosen to takemy maxi-pad business elsewhere. And though I will certainly miss your Flex-Wings, I will not for one minute miss your brand of condescending bullshit. And that’s a promise I will keep. Always. . .

Best,
[Name Witheld]
Austin , TX

Obama has told his Auschwitz story before

Via Transterrestrial Musings...

Thanks to a link from one of my Obama-admiring commenters (thank you, Robert), we learn that Obama's tales of Americans liberating Auschwitz didn't start this weekend. He was telling similar stories about his grandfather back in 2002, in his now-famous Iraq speech, which I'd never previously read:

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The first troops to enter those two camps (in Poland) were Soviet troops, so unless Patton was leading them, this can't be true.


Here is a link to the speech as quoted in Wikisource.

In the speech reveals his priorities: not he worldwide battle against Islamofascism. A battle that is not contained in a single man, Osama, but is contained in a creed that is poisoning a billion people. Instead he claims to believe that the Bush adminsitration is willing to see thousands of servicemen die to distract attention from (in his words)
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

If this is cynical manipulation of a gullible crowd, it is simply evil. If he honestly believes this he is mentally unbalanced.

Vets to Obama on Iraq

Via NRO

On Friday, Vets for Freedom PAC released an advertisement featuring Iraq war veteran Sergeant Garrett Anderson. The ad points out that Senator Obama was unwilling to meet with Illinois veterans, has never met with General Petraeus, and hasn’t visited Iraq in over two years. The facts are the facts, and the ad speaks for itself.

Predictably, the ad sparked fierce opposition from anti-war elements (here, here & here) who accused us of being a “right-wing 527 attack organization.” Except, they forgot to do their research. Vets for Freedom is not a 527, nor an attack organization. Our 24,000 members and 50 state chapters comprise a cross-section of America’s veterans—Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, and liberals—all of which are interested in one thing: victory in Iraq, Afghanistan, and overall the War on Terrorism.

Today, we are releasing a second ad, featuring Iraq war veteran and Vets for Freedom member, Specialist Kate Norley.
CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE AD. Kate, who served 16 months on the front lines as a combat medic, asks Senator Obama two simple, but powerful, questions:


Senator Obama, when will you finally decide to go back to Iraq, to see the progress first hand?
And when will you finally decide to meet one-on-one, unconditionally, with General Petraeus?
The ad also talks about the incredible progress that has been made since Senator Obama last visited Iraq in January 2006: violence down 70%, civil war over, Al Qaeda decimated, political progress occurring, and the Iraqi Army taking the lead. The fact is—the surge has worked, and has moved America closer to overall success in Iraq.

David Carr of the NY Times Whines About Iraq.

David Carr complains about The Wars We Choose to Ignore

And what war are “we” ignoring … and who is “we” white man? Why the war in Iraq of course. And the “we” is
...public indifference to a war that refuses to end,


As if the war was an over-long third act of a tiresome Broadway play that David Carr is reviewing.

Well, Mr. Carr how do “we” know that the public is indifferent to the war in Iraq? Certainly not the people who are fighting there, and their families. Perhaps the “we” is the MSM, of which you are a perfect specimen.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.

Hmmm. That’s not the public, is it Mr. Carr. It’s a statistic that is squarely aimed at the MSM.

Countercolumn has some sharp words for Mr. Carr of the NY Times and his whine.
Dear Mr. Carr,

It's too bad you took what should have been a moving profile of Jessica Ann Ellis and turned it into a journo's whine-fest.

Coverage is down on Iraq because American troops are bleeding less, and for no other reason. If Americans were bleeding more, it would be right back on the front pages. And every reporter knows this.

Katie Couric didn't get crap ratings because she went to Iraq. Couric got crap ratings because it was HER going to Iraq. Nobody cares what that twit thinks about Iraq. She never should have been promoted past any one of fifty real journalists at CBS to the anchor's chair, and the ratings bear that out.

Further, you wrote of American indifference to a "war that refuses to end.' Curious construction, that. But you need to get out more: The American public isn't indifferent to the war. We're indifferent to your crap coverage of the war. And that's a huge difference. Your very own newspaper once described a soldier's decoration as a "Purple Star," and ascribed the Medal of Honor to an award presented to songwriters.

And your own reporter, Alissa Rubin, who hilariously wrote earlier this month that "It's not clear who won" in Sadr City, has got to take the cake for being the dumbest journo in the country. (She's an ok reporter, if she sticks to reporting. But when she tries to do analysis, or editorialize, she's way, WAAAAAAY out of her depth.) (I'm assuming it's the same Rubin, here, but if someone knows I'm wrong, let me know. The Times hasn't responded).

As you can see, this writer … Jason Van Steenwyk…is not happy with Mr. Carr.

I’m not surprised that David Carr and reptiles like him are writing columns like this. I’m positive that he is getting positive feedback from his fellow reptiles in the Times and the Gothamites and assorted fellow travelers in his circle of friends. He little realizes that the rest of the country is increasingly looking at his as if he has some loathsome disease. And they are right. But if you and all your friends are singing from the same hymnal, you will never know if you are singing out of tune.

The reporting community today is not so much in the business of reprting or investigating, but in the business of peddling a line of propaganda. And like a tribe of aborigines, they have no idea that concept and ideas that are different than theirs actually exist. Theirs is the received wisdom, and if a certain dance is designed to bring on the rains, they will dance, damn it, until it rains to prove that the dance works.

Intellectual curiosity has been bred out of this bunch of clowns. Which is not entirely a bad thing because their faults are now easy to see and the destruction of their domain makes for a healthier society.

Welcome to the two way communication world, Mr. Carr.

By the way, Jason's comments regarding the NY Times reporting of the battles in Sadr city and Basra have been dissected before, and it's not pretty. HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

A more dreadful example of getting it wrong could not be imagined.

Free Dominion files its defence against Richard Warman's lawsuit

More on the Canadian "Human Rights Commission" scandal.

About Those "Highly Educated" Voters

The Diplomad

Have a few minutes to spare? Go to "Google," type in the phrase "highly educated voters," hit "Search News." Go ahead. We'll wait . . . OK, what do you get? All sorts of stories about Obama voters, and how he attracts the "highly educated." You will get the same from the pundits on network and cable news: lots of blather about how Obama appeals to "highly educated" Americans.

That, of course, is just more MSM "spin doctor" nonsense and we conservatives let them get away with it. We heard the same song when John "Xmas in Cambodia" Kerry ran for President, to wit, the "highly educated" went for Kerry the ignorant ones went for Bush. Every time you hear that phrase, "highly educated" substitute the phrase "attended a lame liberal college or university." That's what we are really talking about. Given the state of higher education in the world, including in our own beloved Republic, spending four years in a typical "liberal arts" institution generally qualifies you for . . . uh . . . well, not much, except, of course, to boast that you are "highly educated." And that just don't mean a whole hill of beans today. Let me explain.

A few years ago, more than I care to mention, I headed a large office at the State Department. I got tasked with hiring a couple of Presidential Management Interns (PMIs). These PMIs come from the elite of the elite student body at the elite of the elite universities. They get hired on a temporary basis and then, usually, get offered prestigious jobs in the government. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that whatever else I did, I had to hire women. So I began to pore over the resumes. My heart sank. I felt inadequate and so, so inferior to these kids. Their resumes, impeccably printed and organized, using dozens of words ending in "-ization," and listing prowess with a dazzling array of complex software programs, described accomplishments beyond my wildest dreams -- especially for when I was the applicants' age!

I thought I should resign and give up my job to one of the "brilliant" child wonders. Ah, naive me. I obviously had spent too much time overseas. I saw resumes as truthful documents actually written by the applicants, applicants, in this case, full of accomplishments and possessed of massive brains throbbing with energy and ideas. As I, however, kept reading, even slow-witted me began to notice oddities. They all began to look the same: the font, the format, the wording, the list of classes and even -- horrors! -- the "accomplishments." I noted this in passing to a cynical old friend (now, alas, departed) who worked in "human resources" (what a great phrase that). He laughed, "You dope! They get classes on how to write resumes! They have professors and computer programs that put these things together for them." (Remember, folks, computers were new things back then.) He said, "Just randomly pick a couple of women students, they're all the same, hire'em, and move on."

I could not do that. I stole a friend's idea and devised "The World War II Test." I invited the applicants for interviews. These PMI wannabes came off as slick and somewhat rude. I noted something among my subjects, a sense of entitlement, they all, to varying degrees, emitted a message along the lines of "Why are you bothering me with this silly interview? I am obviously brilliant. I have a degree from Columbia. I am not going to spend my whole life as you have in this stupid bureaucracy. I just need this to add to my resume. I am in a hurry." I hit them with the test, which consisted of about dozen questions about WWII and its aftermath. I recall a few,

Can you tell me how US troops got into Europe in the first place? When was WWII? (I would accept a variety of answers as long as the applicant could defend the dates as the true start and end of WWII.) What nations comprised the principal Allied and Axis powers? Who was Neville Chamberlain? What he did he do at Munich and with whom? Who was Mussolini? What did he do to Ethiopia? Who was Stalin? Who was Hirohito? What was D-Day? What President ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs and why? Can you name a result of the Conference at Yalta? What was the Berlin Airlift?

Of the 14 or 15 applicants I interviewed, only one got them all right -- the only male in the crowd, by the way. None, zero, zip of the rest got even ONE right. Not a single one. A very irritated applicant asked me, "Do we really need to know this old stuff?" I noted that we worked with NATO and Europe, hence, it was important to know the background that led to the creation of NATO and the then just-concluded Cold War. She stared at me and said, "What does World War II have to do with NATO, the Cold War and Europe?" I promptly offered the job to the male -- oh, the cries from "Human Resources" -- who turned it down for a more lucrative one in the private sector. In the best Foreign Service tradition, I stalled hiring anybody else, let my two-year assignment run out, and left my poor successor to get stuck with one of the clueless ones.

Back to our story. I wonder how many of the "highly educated voters" could pass that WWII test? Or the Vietnam War Test? Or the Cold War test? Or know much about American history? Or understand the economy? And worst of all, the odds are they can't fire a gun, either.

Moral of the story: do not accept the mantra that Obama voters are "highly educated." They just went to "institutions of higher learning," you know, like the one where the Weatherman terrorist, Bill Ayers, teaches.

Half the battle

Belmont Club

Richard Bernstein reviews a spate of books arguing that World War, rather than being the "Good War", was in fact unnecessary. Or worse, that the Allies were as bad as Hitler. What Bernstein calls a "morally relativistic" position.

The two principle arguments which these books bring forward are a) war is hell, ergo every one who wages it is a devil; and there is no distinction between devils. The second argument against fighting World War 2 is more subtle. Things would have taken care of themselves if they had been left alone; or that it was so badly fought the outcome was worse than if it had never been fought at all.

...

Caroline Glick, in a recent Jerusalem Post article described the strange lure of the argument that unless something can be done perfectly, or at least cleverly, it ought not to be done at all, as epitomized by the views of H.L. Mencken, who maintained until the last that going up against Hitler was a big mistake.

In many ways, Obama and his allies call to mind the influential American newspaperman H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Mencken was the most influential writer in the US. He was an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic agnostic, a supporter of Germany during World War I, and a fierce opponent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. He also opposed American participation in World War II.

In his biography of Mencken, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, Terry Teachout argues that the reason Mencken did not think it was worth fighting Hitler's Germany was because Mencken simply couldn't accept the existence of evil. He could see no moral distinction between Roosevelt, who he despised, and Adolf Hitler who he considered "a boob."


That's not to say that criticism of our received view of World War 2 is not without merit. It was the most brutal conflict in history and it was replete with blunders and incompetence. Taffy 3's crew being left to die in the water after fighting off Kurita's Central Force; the catastrophe at Slapton Sands; the tragic farce at Dieppe; the Army's irrational attachment to the Sherman tank; Peleilu; the surprise of the Battle of the Bulge. More men died at Iwo Jima than ... well, never mind.

These failures are very little in evidence in Steven Speilberg's productions, where World War 2 is raised in nobility (if it were possible to do so) in order to denigrate Vietnam and Iraq. The popular memory of the Second World War is a distorted one. The world yearly hangs its head in commemoration of Hiroshima. But it has forgotten Dresden or Manila, where civilians died in numbers almost as great or greater than in that doomed Japanese city.

But in the end, as Bernstein understands, that when the Best becomes the enemy of the Good it objectively becomes the ally of the Worst. Whatever Churchill and Roosevelt's shortcomings -- and they were many -- the alternatives were Hitler, Tojo and Stalin. History is always setting the world on fire and nailing our peckers to the floor. It always confronts us with hard decisions. It is an unfortunate fact that survival is purchased at a price. Everyone walks out the worse for wear.

Let's, in light of this trend, examine for a moment the idea that the United States should have stayed out of the European war. If that had happened, the Hitlerites surely would have conquered all of Europe, minus Britain. There would have been more mass murder of "inferior" peoples. There would also have been no morally tainted alliance with Stalin, no 40-year Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, no firebombings of German cities like Hamburg and Dresden, and no deaths among American soldiers.


Wellington expressed the idea forcefully in his dispatch from Waterloo. "Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."

Put a Shyster in Your Tank

Best of the Web - Wall Street Journal:
Growing global demand and a weak dollar have given us $4-a-gallon gasoline. The way to lower prices would seem obvious: pump more oil domestically and strengthen the dollar. That's too obvious for Congress, apparently, which instead wants to solve the problem through litigation:

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.
The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
This idiocy is bipartisan, with a majority of Republicans joining all but two Democrats in supporting the bill. If this bill becomes law and the Justice Department goes ahead with it, remember when you're paying $6 a gallon that a good chunk of that is going to lawyers' fees.

Obama then and now

Powerline

As one listens to Barack Obama attempt to explain himself on foreign policy, one begins to wonder whether the man is not something of an overaged collegiate slinger. At NRO's Corner Andrew McCarthy looks at Obama then and now on Iran. Here is Obama last week:

Iran, Cuba, Venezuela—these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet.
Here is Obama in a 2004 Chicago Tribune article by Obama biographer David Mendel that was originally noted by blogger Lance Adams:
"In light of the fact that we're now in Iraq, with all the problems in terms of perceptions about America that have been created, us launching some missile strikes into Iran is not the optimal position for us to be in," he said.

"On the other hand, having a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran. . . . And I hope it doesn't get to that point. But realistically, as I watch how this thing has evolved, I'd be surprised if Iran blinked at this point." . . .

Obama said that violent Islamic extremists are a vastly different brand of foe than was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they must be treated differently.

"With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don't want to be blown up, we don't want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain," Obama said. "I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don't make those same calculations. . . ."

Pallywood on parade

Powerline
Richard Landes has produced a 14-minute video accompanying his column on the French court of appeals judgment reversing the defamtion verdict against Phillipe Karsenty in connection with his criticism of the infamous France 2 television report on the death of Muhammad al-Dura:

In the asymmetrical warfare of global Jihad against the West, the “weak” side treats the media of the “strong” side as a theater of war, and no single case shows the Western journalism’s vulnerability to this kind of manipulation better than the Al Durah affair. Nothing illustrates the dysfunctions of our media more than their pervasive refusal to reconsider this case...

The video takes a look at the staging of other more recent instances of Pallywood (disseminated by the New York Times and Time) as wel as the al-Dura hoax reported by Charles Enderlin and broadcast by France 2.

Oil Executives Try to Educate Senate Democrats, But Democrats Appear Hopeless

Powerline:

One theme that emerged from the hearing was the surprisingly small role played by American oil companies in the global petroleum market. John Lowe pointed out:

I cannot overemphasize the access issue. Access to resources is severely restricted in the United States and abroad, and the American oil industry must compete with national oil companies who are often much larger and have the support of their governments.
We can only compete directly for 7 percent of the world's available reserves while about 75 percent is completely controlled by national oil companies and is not accessible.



Stephen Simon amplified:

Exxon Mobil is the largest U.S. oil and gas company, but we account for only 2 percent of global energy production, only 3 percent of global oil production, only 6 percent of global refining capacity, and only 1 percent of global petroleum reserves. With respect to petroleum reserves, we rank 14th. Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects requiring enormous long-term investments.
To simply maintain our current operations and make needed capital investments, Exxon Mobil spends nearly $1 billion each day.


Surprising?

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Does Barack Have an Uncle and Did He Liberate Auschwitz?

Well, no.

But it makes a good story, and is designed to appeal to Jews.

His mother was an only child, so Obama has no American uncles. His uncles on his father’s side (the ones from Kenya), if they participated in WW2, did not go to Europe.

According to the Obama camp, the “uncle” who was actually a great-uncle who did not liberate Auschwitz but instead participated in the liberation of a labor camp called Ohrdruf (a name likely unrecognizable to most Americans under age 70).

Ohrdruf, per the President, Society of the 89th Division, WWII:
...these camps which I and others prefer to refer to as slave labor camps, were not engaged in any discernable program of extermination of certain groups such as the Jews. An after action report of the G-5 staff (military government) of the 89th Division was given to me with a query from a young lawyer in Belgium. The survivors of many of these camps were administered to by military government personnel and were found to be victims of sickness, starvation and slave labor to the extent that most of them were in very bad shape. These people, along with many others became classified as displaced persons (DP's); some of them spent many years in DP camps in Germany before finding a new home elsewhere. But in answer to my query, there was no connection between the activities of the concentration camps and these slave labor camps.
Role of the 89th in that liberation, from a platoon leader of the 89th Recon Troop:
My 2nd Platoon was reconnoitering ahead of the infantry regiment (355th) on that day and we came upon this complex and two German soldiers who were guarding the front gates. We shot and killed one, and the other ran off. Setting up a modest defense, we entered the compound and saw first hand the horror of life in a Nazi concentration camp. We radioed our troop headquarters for instructions and were told to remain there, keeping the inmates contained (this was hardly necessary, as most were in their bunks, hardly able to walk) while HQ contacted the infantry to relieve us. In less than three hours, the infantry (3rd Battalion, 355th Inf) arrived and we were sent on a new mission.

Just out of curiosity - was the entire 89th involved in this three-hour operation that sent Uncle Charlie to the attic for six months?

So what we appear to have is something that’s commonly known as “resume inflation.” And that’s what you get when you have a man who has no real experience. When what you have is an empty suit who is trying to pretend that there is substance there.

But what was the point of the fable? The point was really to try to connect with the American people by telling them how callous the government is about the emotional problems of its soldiers. The “uncle” is supposed to have spent six months in the attic, having experienced the sights he encountered in the liberation of Ohrdruf, an experience that may have lasted less than three hours.

The punch line is that Obama will make sure that America’s fighting men and will get all the mental care they deserve.

That’s it. That’s the punch line. That’s the reason for the fable. That’s what American fighting men are good for: a story line for a health care pitch. And the combat vet is cast in the eternal role that the Liberals have created for him: the crazy uncle in the attic. Just wait until Barack discovers another uncle whose wartime experiences drove him to drink and living in the street when he isn’t shooting up a beer hall on Saturday nights.

Mascot Politics

Thomas Sowell on "black mascots" and affirmative action.

Years ago, when Jack Greenberg left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become a professor at Columbia University, he announced that he was going to make it a point to hire a black secretary at Columbia.

This would of course make whomever he hired be seen as a token black, rather than as someone selected on the basis of competence.

This reminded me of the first time I went to Milton Friedman's office when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago back in 1960, and I noticed that he had a black secretary. This was four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and there was no such thing as affirmative action.

It so happened that Milton Friedman had another black secretary decades later, at the Hoover Institution-- and she was respected as one of the best secretaries around.

When I mentioned to someone at the Hoover Institution that I was having a hard time finding a secretary who could handle a tough job in my absence, I was told that I needed someone like Milton Friedman's secretary-- and that there were not many like her.

At no time in all these years did I hear Milton Friedman say, either publicly or privately, that he had a black secretary.

William F. Buckley's wife once mentioned in passing, at dinner in her home, that she had been involved for years in working with a school in Harlem. But I never heard her or Bill Buckley ever say that publicly.

Nor do conservatives who were in the civil rights marches in the South, back when that was dangerous, make that a big deal.

For people on the left, however, blacks are trophies or mascots, and must therefore be put on display. Nowhere is that more true than in politics.

The problem with being a mascot is that you are a symbol of someone else's significance or virtue. The actual well-being of a mascot is not the point.

Liberals all across the country have not hesitated to destroy black neighborhoods in the name of "urban renewal," often replacing working-class neighborhoods with upscale homes and pricey businesses-- neither of which the former residents can afford.

In academia, lower admissions standards for black students is about having them as a visible presence, even if mismatching them with the particular college or university produces high dropout rates.

The black students who don't make it are replaced by others, and when many of them don't make it, there are still more others.

The point is to have black faces on campus, as mascots symbolizing what great people there are running the college or university.

Many, if not most, of the black students who do not make it at big-name, high-pressure institutions are perfectly qualified to succeed at the normal range of colleges and universities.

Most white students would also punch out if admitted to schools for which they don't have the same qualifications as the other students. But nobody needs white mascots.

Various empirical studies have indicated that blacks succeed best at institutions where there is little or no difference between their qualifications and the qualifications of the other students around them.

This is not rocket science but it is amazing how much effort and cleverness have gone into denying the obvious.

A study by Professor Richard Sander of the UCLA law school suggests that there may be fewer black lawyers as a result of "affirmative action" admissions to law schools that are a mismatch for the individuals admitted.

Leaping to the defense of black criminals is another common practice among liberals who need black mascots. Most of the crimes committed by black criminals are committed against other blacks. But, again, the actual well-being of mascots is not the point.

Politicians who use blacks as mascots do not hesitate to throw blacks to the wolves for the benefit of the teachers' unions, the green zealots whose restrictions make housing unaffordable, or people who keep low-price stores like Wal-Mart out of their cities.

Using human beings as mascots is not idealism. It is self-aggrandizement that is ugly in both its concept and its consequences.

Monday, May 26, 2008

Obama Echos the Reverend Wright

Barack Obama gave a commencement speech at Wesleyan University the other day. Pinch hitting for Teddy Kennedy who out sailing on his yacht, he peppered the speech with references to other Kennedys who had gone before. Adding to the list of things we cannot say about Obama, we can’t compare him to Robert Kennedy, but he can … and does.

It will be remembered by people who have been following the Jeremiah Wright controversy that Wright denounced “middle classism” in no uncertain terms all the while having a $1.6 million, 4 bedroom 10,000 square foot house built for him in a gated community.

In an echo of Wright’s denunciation of “middle classism” Obama
...urged students to focus on more than "the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy."

The idea that there is something unique in “our money culture” that causes people to want to have the good things of life is … stupid. And hypocritical.

With the possible exception of hermits and certain religious orders that take a vow of poverty, all people everywhere strive to have the good things in life. Poorer societies define “good things” down.

In Haiti, eating cakes not mixed with mud is considered a step up. In other third world hellholes, having a roof over your head is a sign of prosperity.

It so happens that in the United States, we have worked and achieved an unprecedented level of mass prosperity.

We can think of buying not just basic shelter but a house, even a big house like Barack Obama lives in

and the one Jeremiah Wright had his church build for him (see above).

And if we prosper we can buy nice suits like the ones that Barack Obama wears.

This has the not-so-faint whiff of the kind of socialist claptrap expressed by George Orwell in “Animal Farm” where all animals were equal but some were “more equal” than others. I, for one, do not want to see my political masters decide for me how to live and what to wear. Most especially not when they live in the big house and they wear the nice suits but they don't want me to do the same.

Oh, and what did he tell the Wesleyan graduates to do with their college degrees?

…Obama urged college graduates Sunday to "make us believe again" by dedicating themselves to public service.

At a time when America is over-run by government employees and needs to import engineers, technicians, doctors and farm workers the last thing we need is for college graduates to leave school and apply for a job as a government employee to perform "public service." We need plumbers and electricians and auto mechanics. Those are the people that perform a REAL public service, not the drones that work as "community organizers."

And in an exhortation that sounds like a command:
At a time of so much cynicism and so much doubt, we need you to make us believe again. That's your task, Class of 2008."



The scent of Fascism hangs heavy over the Obama campaign when you combine his demands (That's your task, Class of 2008) with the threat of Michelle “My Belle” Obama that Barack”
[Barack Obama]…will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. [Barack Obama] will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”


In the “Obamastate” we will have our tasks. We will have our jobs…in government. We will be required to work, uncynically, cheerfully, as a unified mass, Stakhanovite man, shut off from our previous lives. And we WILL LIKE IT! OR ELSE!

Oh Brave New World.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Michelle Obama is fair game

Michelle Obama on the stump:


Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe:
ON THE website of the Tennessee Republican Party is a short video in which residents of Nashville talk about the pride they feel for their country.
...
In an interview on ABC, Obama growled that Republicans "should lay off my wife," and described the inoffensive Tennessee video as "detestable," "low class," and reflecting "a lack of decency."

If Republicans "think that they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign," he added ominously, "they should be careful."

Ooh, very fierce. But unless Obama is prepared to emulate Jackson - Old Hickory defended his wife's honor by fighting duels, in one of which he killed a man - he stands no chance of putting his wife's remarks off-limits to criticism. As long as he keeps sending her around the country to campaign on his behalf, everything she says is - and should be - fair game.
...
Mrs. Obama seems to say with grim regularity is that America is a scary, bleak, and hopeless place.

Here she is, for instance, in Wisconsin:

"Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, through Republican and Democratic administrations. It hasn't gotten much better."


And in South Carolina:

America is "just downright mean" and "guided by fear . . . We have become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day."


And in North Carolina:

"Folks are struggling like never before . . . When you're that busy struggling all the time, which most people that you know and I know are, you don't have time to get to know your neighbor . . . In fact, you feel very alone in your struggle, because you feel that somehow it must be your fault that you're struggling so hard . . . People are afraid, because when your world's not right, no matter how hard you work, then you become afraid of everyone and everything, because you don't know whose fault it is, why you can't get a handle on life, why you can't secure a better future for your kids . . . Fear is the worst enemy. It . . . creates this veil of impossibility, and it is hanging over all of our heads."


There is also her creepily authoritarian vision of life under an Obama administration. From a speech in California:

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual - uninvolved, uninformed."


This woman scares me.

Sex and the Sissy

Peggy Noonan compares successful woman politicians and Hillary. Hillary does not come off well.

She was born in Russia, fled the pogroms with her family, was raised in Milwaukee, and worked the counter at her father's general store when she was 8. In early adulthood she made aliyah to Palestine, where she worked on a kibbutz, picking almonds and chasing chickens. She rose in politics, was the first woman in the first Israeli cabinet, soldiered on through war and rumors of war, became the first and so far only woman to be prime minister of Israel. And she knew what it is to be a woman in the world. "At work, you think of the children you've left at home. At home you think of the work you've left unfinished. . . . Your heart is rent." This of course was Golda Meir.


AP
Golda Meir never cried 'sexism.'
Another: She was born in a family at war with itself and the reigning power outside. As a child she carried word from her important father to his fellow revolutionaries, smuggling the papers in her school bag. War and rumors of war, arrests, eight months in jail. A rise in politics -- administering refugee camps, government minister. When war came, she refused to flee an insecure border area; her stubbornness helped rally a nation. Her rivals sometimes called her "Dumb Doll," and an American president is said to have referred to her in private as "the old witch." But the prime minister of India preferred grounding her foes to dust to complaining about gender bias. In the end, and in the way of things, she was ground up too. Proud woman, Indira Gandhi.

And there is Margaret Hilda Roberts. A childhood in the besieged Britain of World War II -- she told me once of listening to the wireless and being roused by Churchill. "Westward look, the land is bright," she quoted him; she knew every stanza of the old poem. Her father, too, was a shopkeeper, and she grew up in the apartment above the store near the tracks. She went to Oxford on scholarship, worked as a chemist, entered politics, rose, became another first and only, succeeding not only in a man's world but in a class system in which they knew how to take care of ambitious little grocer's daughters from Grantham. She was to a degree an outsider within her own party, so she remade it. She lived for ideas as her colleagues lived for comfort and complaint. The Tories those days managed loss. She wanted to stop it; she wanted gain. Just before she became prime minister, the Soviets, thinking they were deftly stigmatizing an upstart, labeled her the Iron Lady. She seized the insult and wore it like a hat. This was Thatcher, stupendous Thatcher, now the baroness.

Great women, all different, but great in terms of size, of impact on the world and of struggles overcome. Struggle was not something they read about in a book. They did not use guilt to win election -- it comes up zero if you Google "Thatcher" and "You're just picking on me because I'm a woman." Instead they used the appeals men used: stronger leadership, better ideas, a superior philosophy.

* * *

You know where I'm going, for you know where she went. Hillary Clinton complained again this week that sexism has been a major dynamic in her unsuccessful bid for political dominance. She is quoted by the Washington Post's Lois Romano decrying the "sexist" treatment she received during the campaign, and the "incredible vitriol that has been engendered" by those who are "nothing but misogynists." The New York Times reported she told sympathetic bloggers in a conference call that she is saddened by the "mean-spiritedness and terrible insults" that have been thrown "at you, for supporting me, and at women in general."

Where to begin? One wants to be sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton at this point, if for no other reason than to show one's range. But her last weeks have been, and her next weeks will likely be, one long exercise in summoning further denunciations. It is something new in politics, the How Else Can I Offend You Tour. And I suppose it is aimed not at voters -- you don't persuade anyone by complaining in this way, you only reinforce what your supporters already think -- but at history, at the way history will tell the story of the reasons for her loss.

So, to address the charge that sexism did her in:

It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.

It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.

It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they'd give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they'd call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they'd realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.

It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton's supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.

It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say "Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other's bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it's like that for the boys and for the girls."

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.

* * *

It is probably truer that being a woman helped Mrs. Clinton. She was the front-runner anyway and had all the money, power, Beltway backers. But the fact that she was a woman helped give her supporters the special oomph to be gotten from making history. They were by definition involved in something historic. And they were on the right side, connected to the one making the breakthrough, shattering the glass. They were going to be part of breaking it into a million little pieces that could rain down softly during the balloon drop at the historic convention, each of them catching the glow of the lights. Some network reporter was going to say, "They look like pieces of the glass ceiling that has finally been shattered."

I know: Barf. But also: Fine. Politics should be fun.

Meir and Gandhi and Mrs. Thatcher suffered through the political downside of their sex and made the most of the upside. Fair enough. As for this week's Clinton complaints, I imagine Mrs. Thatcher would bop her on the head with her purse. Mrs. Gandhi would say "That is no way to play it." Mrs. Meir? "They said I was the only woman in the cabinet and the only one with -- well, you know. I loved it."


What's really funny is that the Clinton campaign now seems to be following the script from Rush Limbaugh's parodies.

Some humor for a Sunday



and this...

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Hillary’s Bobby Kennedy “Gaffe”





First of all, while I consider both Clintons to by despicable, lying sociopaths, I don’t think that Hillary was suggesting that somebody should assassinate Obama. I’m not even of the opinion that she thinks that Obama will be killed like Bobby Kennedy was. What she was saying was that “anything can happen” and she honestly believes that she is the better candidate and the delegates may come to that conclusion.

Now what is the real reason for the nuclear explosion that followed her comment? There are several: the primary one is that the MSM is in the tank for Obama and they are trying to take her out.


But here’s something that has been running around in the back of my mind. What if some of the ladies and gentlemen of the press secretly think that Hillary is capable of getting rid of problems … like Vince Foster? Of course the MSM derided the Fort Marcy Park conspiracy fans when they were carrying the Clintons’ water. But how many of them now suspect that Vince may not have … gone willingly.

Of course they will deny this, but I suspect that the reason this statement got the attention it did was because it triggered something in the media psyche.

Here’s a funny version of this from Iowahawk.

Protesting the Antiwar Protestors? No! Showing Support for America and the Troops!

The Wall Street Journal reprints a column by Kevin Ferris, an assistant editor and columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It's a good article and it's subject, Rich Davis, is doing what I wish I could be doing in Norfolk.

Here's the start of the story (read the whole thing):


Memorial Day isn't until Monday. But for Rich Davis, a 20-year veteran of the Navy, it seems to come every Saturday. That's when he pulls out a handmade sign and heads for a street corner near the Chester County Court House in this suburban Philadelphia community.

Mr. Davis, 54, is a pro-military protester who makes a public stand each week in support of the troops and their mission.

Supporters of the Chester County Victory Movement rally on May 17, 2008.
In 2001, Mr. Davis retired from the Navy and ended up settling in West Chester, where he spent 2006 and 2007 watching antiwar protesters rally each Saturday from 11 a.m. until noon outside the courthouse near his apartment. The Chester County Peace Movement, Mr. Davis would later learn, had been demonstrating at the site since March 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq. At first he hoped someone would challenge the protesters, speak up for the troops, and defend their mission. On Sept. 8, 2007 he decided that someone had to be him.



But I kept looking at the headline after reading the story and something bothered me. The headline made Davis' demonstration a reaction. In fact, while Davis was inspired by the anti-war protesters, he is not protesting them. He is demonstrating his love of country and support of the troops. His is a positive demonstration, not a negative one. it is the so-called "anti-war" demonstrators who are doing the negating.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Texas Polygamist Sect Case: Another Duke Lacrosse Rape Case?

Remember the Duke Lacrosse Rape case? You know, where a bunch of rich, white jocks gang rape a poor black girl? Except that it didn’t happen. The prosecutor was disbarred and Duke University and the city of Durham are being sued for millions.

Yeah, that one.

Well the “Texas Polygamist Case” seems to be heading in that direction. What set if off was a telephone complaint from someone claiming to be a pregnant abused 16 year-old teenage wife. Except that this person was never found and the call is suspected of being a hoax.

From the AP story:

SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court said Thursday that the state had no right to take more than 400 children from a polygamist sect's ranch, a ruling that could unravel one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history.

The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that the state offered "legally and factually insufficient" grounds for the "extreme" measure of removing all children from the ranch, from babies to teenagers.

The state never provided evidence that the children were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court approval, the appeals court said.

It also failed to show evidence that more than five of the teenage girls were being sexually abused, and never alleged any sexual or physical abuse against the other children, the court said.



In fact, the five pregnant teen age girls did not say they were sexually abused and in Texas, as in many other states, it is legal for teen-age girls to have babies. If child protective services were to remove the children from every family that had teen agers who were pregnant, a large part of many major cities would be devoid of children.

The court ruling is not very long and reveals the fact that the primary impetus behind the decision to remove the children was that the LDS sect was considered to have “weird” customs and beliefs.

As in the Duke Rape case, the facts presented via the press came from CPS, who had every reason to make this case as horrible as possible, with accusations of rampant polygamy, child abuse and rape of young girls by older men. None of these accusations has been substantiated. The San Angelo Standard Times has been covering the story and gives more details.

Alan Bock's Blog has some critical things to say about CPS and the media in this case.

Another problem, hinted at in stories when the raid was conducted in April, is that the telephoned tips about abuse and young girls forced into marriage may not have come from inside the compound but from a more-or-less professional polygamy-buster who claimed to be a young girl. At any rate, the girl who was supposedly the informant has never been identified or found.

What's fascinating about all this is that most of the news media have been cheering on and gloating about the raids and generally pining for more. All it takes to arouse the seizure-lust of most of the media, apparently, is allegations of child abuse along with the fact that members of the group are just plain weird.


For evidence of how the media have seized on this and their depiction of the case, see the BBC's take, the lurid reporting of the LA Times, and Time - which celebrates the aberrant behavior rich girls who don’t wear panties wrote about:
women seemingly dressed for Little House on the Prairie, whose modest appearance was jarring with their sexually aberrant lifestyle.

No one in the MSM should ever have the right to use the term "sexually aberrant lifestyle" again.

It remains to be seen what the outcome of a full and fair investigation will be. Polygamy is against the law in the US although that barrier to marriage should fall soon now that the definition of marriage has become malleable. The rationale against marrying multiple spouses is no more rational that the ban against homosexual marriage ... I'm sure the men in black robes that rule us will agree.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Just Click Play and Wait for It

That Global Warming Consensus? Not Now, Never Was.

31,072 American scientists have signed this petition,
including 9,021 with PhDs




Oh, and it looks like global warming, from whatever source, has been put on "hold" for a decade.

Marriage for Everyone and Anything

Glenn Reynolds links to a discussion of marriage by cousins. William Saletan is for it while Megan McArdle disapproves.

The fact is that the legalization homosexual marriage cannot be the end of the re-definition of what a marriage is. Once the ages-old definition of marriage as between a men and a woman is no longer valid, other barriers need to be broken to avoid charges of discrimination.

And everyone knows, discrimination is not allowed.

The weak excuse that cousins marrying could cause heightened chance birth defects is ludicrous. So what? Homosexual unions cannot lead to children at all while certain homosexual practices lead to the high probability of deadly diseases like HIV. Those appear to be no longer valid reasons to restrict either marriage or non-marital homosexual practices. The mere though is met with accusations of homophobia.

Perhaps we will have to create new words for practices that are now forbidden but should not be by reason of legal symmetry. What should we call the fear of marriage by cousins? “Cousinphobia?” And then there are those other fears expressed by the backward “bitter clingers” like "Polyphobia" (the groundless fear of multiple wives or husbands), or “Speciesphobia” defined as the fear that some girl will want to marry the horse that she loves.

And then there is the well known “Inanimateobjectphobia.” But that’s a few years down the road.

A Day of Sadness - And rank hypocrisy.

Howard Kurtz eulogizes Ted Kennedy somewhat prematurely in my opinion. The man is not dead yet. And despite his stature as a KENNEDY and therefore a shoo-in for Liberal sainthood, may I suggest that all the encomiums include the sort of stuff that were said of Nixon after his death? No obituary was complete without the obligatory - and lengthy - reference to Watergate. Could we have just a mention of Miss Kopechne? Perhaps before his state funeral?

But just because he could not help himself, he takes a below-the-belt jab at Michelle Malkin:
(A digression: Michelle Malkin is among those conservatives asking readers to put aside political differences and pray for Kennedy and his family, and most of her commenters did just that. But there were a few, revoltingly hateful exceptions-- posters who were reveling in the news and, in one case, talked of celebrating.)


Which makes the comments section following his article especially revealing.

Charles Johnson also noted this:
I’ve pointed this out before, but Howard Kurtz is being stunningly hypocritical when he attacks blogs for these kinds of comments—because the Washington Post’s own comments sections are often just chock full of ugly, hateful posts wishing death on people. And they almost never police them.

Their recent article on Ted Kennedy’s misfortune is a case in point. Right on the first page of comments, without even searching, we find this lovely sentiment, wishing death on the President of the United States:

TomIII wrote:

Actually its less than 364 days. January 20 is about 8 months away.

Chimpy has been the worst President in the history of the US and should have been impeached.

It would be fitting if an angry mob dragged him out of his crappy Crawford ranch and tore him limb from limb.

Death to traitors.

5/21/2008 8:55:56
PM

Frank Ideas To Reinvigorate The Republican Party By Frank J.

It's pretty universally well known that the Republicans are in huge trouble as they've lost a number of special elections that I don't know much about but all the smart people say are very important. At least I know I don't care much more Republicans anymore; they lately just seem like a less mincing version of the Democrats. Frankly, things are so bad that for Republicans that if the Democrats don't get the White House and huge gains in the House and Senate, they should really all jump off a bridge for sucking that much.
The new face of the Republican Party?

So the Republicans obviously need a new strategy if they want to regain power, and talking about how bad the other side is just ain't it. Everyone knows the Democrats suck, but do they know if the Republicans don't suck? I sure don't. Republicans really need to be for something. For instance, they can't just hope to win saying how bad liberals are; they need to be for something such as for punching liberals since they're so bad. Now, I'm no Karl Rove -- I don't even like the taste of souls -- but here are my ideas for a stronger, reinvigorated Republican Party.

FRANK IDEAS FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY TO REINVIGORATE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

* Cut Pork: ..
* Punch the Hippies:

And 5 other ideas that make sense.

The Daily Kos Post Of The Day: The KKK & Michelle Obama

I see this is going to be a clean, highminded campaign by the Left.

Winds of War, Hope and Change We Can Believe In?

Can you believe that Iranians are asking us to attack their leadership?

As Barack Obama and John McCain “debate” over how each would negotiate with Iran, the dissidents within Iran are voicing to the world an unusual message: “If the United States strikes hard and fast, we will support you.”


“U.S. airstrikes must be powerful and sustained enough to break the myth of the regime’s absolute power and reveal the weakness of the leadership,” a former official who traveled outside of Iran recently said.

The United States should target the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards Corp, the offices of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that of his predecessor and rival, Mullah Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Iranian sources say.

The goal should be to carry out sustained airstrikes over a 48-72 hour period that would “decapitate” the regime. [...]

That's an ivitation that's hard to pass up.

Barack Gaffes

Michelle Malkin:
All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life. The political establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful misspelling of “potatoe.” The New York Times distorted and misreported the first President Bush’s questions about new scanner technology at a grocers’ convention to brand him permanently as out of touch.

But what about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him throughout the campaign:

Last May, he claimed that tornadoes in Kansas killed a whopping 10,000 people: “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The actual death toll: 12.

Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United States: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”

Last week, in front of a roaring Sioux Falls, S.D., audience, Obama exulted: “Thank you, Sioux City. ... I said it wrong. I’ve been in Iowa for too long. I’m sorry.”

Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: “Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?

Obama has as much trouble with numbers as he has with maps. Last March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala., he claimed his parents united as a direct result of the civil rights movement: “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala., because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.”

Obama was born in 1961. The Selma march took place in 1965. His spokesman, Bill Burton, later explained that Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil-rights movement as a whole.”

Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by homing in on a lack of translators: “We only have a certain number of them, and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” The real reason it’s “harder for us to use them” in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or other non-Arabic languages.

Over the weekend in Oregon, Obama pleaded ignorance of the decades-old, multibillion-dollar massive Hanford nuclear-waste cleanup: “Here’s something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that is that I’m not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I promise you I’ll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back to the airport.”

I assume on that ride, a staffer reminded him that he’s voted on at least one defense-authorization bill that addressed the “costs, schedules, and technical issues” dealing with the nation’s most contaminated nuclear-waste site.

Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed nugget about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama’s Dreams from My Father: “Then, there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.”

And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us” — cluelessly arguing that “tiny countries” with small defense budgets can’t do us harm — and then promptly flip-flopped the next day, claiming, “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

Barack Obama — promoted by the Left and the media as an all-knowing, articulate, transcendent Messiah — is a walking, talking gaffe machine. How many more passes does he get? How many more can we afford?


Good questions.