Palesinian Civil War ... ?

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Hamas fighters overran one of the rival Fatah movement's most important security installations in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, and witnesses said the victors dragged vanquished gunmen from the building and killed them in the street.

AND NOW A WORD FROM AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL:

[crickets]

Democrats, the Anti-Free Speech Party

And so we reach the inevitable end of the left’s campaign against the First Amendment. The Democrats in Broward County have officially declared themselves as the anti-free speech party. Commissioner Ritter is to be applauded for her candor, for declaring openly what elected Democrats across the country mutter quietly to themselves: “Rush, Sean and the rest must be silenced!”


I have heard of brass-knuckled politics before, but never anything on the order of denying your political opponents news of approaching hurricanes.


When Katrina struck, some wild-eyed lefties accused President Bush of denying relief efforts to New Orleans because the city was predominantly African-American.


Now we have actual proof of Democrats wanting to keep conservatives in the dark about approaching storms.

Rudy's Contract With America

Sounds good.

“I love America; it’s Americans and everything they do, say or stand for that I can’t stand.”

Good summary of Liberalism. And if you think I'm painting with a broad brush ... tough. Suck it up.

Before We Can Win the War Must We First Kill All The Lawyers?

We have identified several ways of defeating the IEDs in Iraq. The lawyers say no.

Take the question of targeting bomb makers: There may be an unlimited supply of explosives in Iraq, but there is not an unlimited supply of people who know how to wire the detonators. In 2004, CIA operatives in Iraq believed that they had identified the signatures of 11 bomb makers. They proposed a diabolical -- but potentially effective -- sabotage program that would have flooded Iraq with booby-trapped detonators designed to explode in the bomb makers' hands. But the CIA general counsel's office said no. The lawyers claimed that the agency lacked authority for such an operation, one source recalled.

There are technologies that would allow us to detonate every roadside bomb in Iraq by heating the wires in the detonators to the point that they triggered an explosion. But these systems could severely harm civilians nearby, so we're not using them, either. "In our system, we often are not given credit for the fact that we are very concerned about collateral damage," Meigs said.

Computer Simulation of 9/11

It’s still wrenching to see what happened when American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 wide-body aircraft, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Now researchers at Purdue University have created a computer visualization of the horrifically violent impact, from many different viewpoints.

Gramscian damage

• Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithetic. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.
  
  We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.
  [...]
  In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:
  
  o There is no truth, only competing agendas.
  o All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
  o There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
  o The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
  o Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
  o The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
  o For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
  o When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Read the whole thing.

The Constitution: Living or Dead?

The Constitution is a “living document” that must be understood in view of the evolving understanding of the American people.

No, the Constitution is as fixed and immutable as the stars.

Strangely enough, in the current political climate, positions can and do change in a heartbeat depending on the issue under discussion.

In declaring the death penalty for tens of millions of babies, and making the maternal womb the most dangerous place for a child to be, the living, breathing document exuded emanations of penumbras (or was it the other way around)?

In deciding who is an enemy combatant, the 19th century definition of warfare must be strictly adhered to or we will live in a Fascist police state designed by BushHitlerCheney forever.

Decisions regarding military tactics are determined by the Washington legal staff of the Defense Department and the CIA. And decisions as to who is a soldier fighting on the side of Islam is determined by the 4th Circuit Court.

We are truly screwed.

At least one of the more conservative journalists (and God knows they are few) are beginning to discuss the way the MSM covers "hate crimes."

And why are so few horribly brutal black on white crimes officially prosecuted as "hate crimes?"

The black cop pelted with rocks and racial epithets by white toughs with political connections. White cops who shot at a black couple for cutting them off in traffic. That white teacher whose face was rearranged by a black student with a hammer. All these and more could have been considered hate crimes. But application of the hate-crime statutes is, at bottom, highly political and therefore suspect, because politicians like to get re-elected.

How about this one:

Ionya Feldman didn't have a chance to discuss politics with Charles Dixon in 1998. Dixon was young and strong and wanted money. He found a length of firewood in the alley and entered the little shoemaker's shop and swung his club against the old man's skull, again and again.

It wasn't a hate crime because no one heard Dixon say hateful words. Although picking out an old man for a beating is hateful enough. Dixon was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, and I wrote a series of columns about the killing and the trial.

One day, in her apartment, Feldman's widow, Jane, poured tea and told me about her Ionya and asked me why her husband's death wasn't a hate crime.

And I think of how quiet it was in the apartment, the beautiful things from their old life that she had saved, crystal and plates, the light through the windows, her hands pouring tea.

The AP redefines what it sees as "journalism." Of course it's simply admitting what has been obvious: that what it has been doing is disseminating propaganda.

News Analysis: John Edwards Is Adorable!

British Muslim tried to enlist his mail-order bride to become a suicide bomber.

New York Times equates Holocaust to Korean War.

Actually, that is only a mild exaggeration, and it's only true up till today.

UPDATE: Not much of an exaggeration:

‘‘Christian children ride motorcycles. A percentage of Muslim youth say suicide bombings are justified. Chalk it up to youthful rebellion and telephone survey bravado.’’ -- Pueblo Chieftain article See...
[Link: http://www.chieftain.com/life/1181368800/4]
Imagine that. Murder and mayhem are to Muslim children just like riding a motorcycle is to Christian children, a simple act of rebellion against their parents.
Yeah....Right....

Reuters defends islamic cabbies that won't drive you if you're carrying alcohol or have a seeing eye dog.

Victory Davis Hansen points out that the Islamofascists biggest accomplishment is understanding the American Liberal psyche.

We need to confess that the jihadists are not only keen students of insurgency warfare, but good observers of the American psyche. We think their kidnapping, childish infomercials, gruesome tactics, and horrific websites are primordial and counterproductive; but they are more likely horrifically simple in inciting the most basic fears and self-preservation instincts of ordinary people. Precisely because decapitation belongs to a different century makes it more gruesome now, not less. Because the al Qaedists steal many of their talking points from the Western Left does not make them unimaginative as much as eerily familiar. And because we can daily predict the serial barbarity of the jihadists makes it not so much unimaginative as savagely inevitable.

The Non Civil War

The MSM's reluctance to call the Gaza civil war a civil war --the New York Times this morning refers to "what is beginning to look increasingly like a civil war"-- is because the Gaza meltdown doesn't fit the tired media narrative that sees America as "breeding terrorists" in Iraq and the conflict in the Palestinian territories as the result of Israeli oppression. (Instapundit is posting "non civil war updates".) The idea that virulent Islamist fundamentalism is spawning crisis after crisis across the globe, crises which cannot be ignored or retreated from, is alien to folks whose agenda journalism is driven by BDS.

Jeff Goldstein is brilliant at pointing out that if you capture the language, you win the debate.

But as with the surrendering of meaning to the interpretive community—however pragmatic it may seem at the time to do so (and businesses, let’s remember, will nearly always take the road of least resistance)—the danger lies in the tacit acceptance of the premise itself. Which is why I’ve argued, for instance, that when the White House or Bill Kristol, eg., criticize Bill Bennett for not being more circumspect about how his words “about” Blacks and abortion are likely to be taken out of context by those whose agenda it is to “prove” the underlying racism at the heart of conservative ideology, they are actually doing conservatism a disservice; that is, they have decided to trade pragmatic expedience and problem-avoidance for the more difficult task of standing their ground and debating the points on their merits (in Bennett’s case, conservatives should have been insisting that he did nothing wrong, and that those who elected to interpret what he said incorrectly should learn to read and process analogies with the same expertise that they are able to suss out racism from the most benign of utterances, Britt Hume’s “spearchucker” included).

Is the amnesty bill and attempt to head off enforcement of immigration laws at the local level?

I oppose government censorship of the press. But - and it's a big but - the press has shown such shocking irresponsibility that the defenders of a free press are becoming much like the parent of Paris Hilton, defending the indefensible.

As you follow the debate over the Bush-Kennedy immigration bill, keep this cardinal rule in mind: 99.99 percent of the lawmakers who promise you that they'll ensure the deportation of anyone who doesn't follow their new "guest-worker" regulations are either A) lying or B) completely clueless.

Rule No. 2: Anyone who plays the Enforcement equals Kicking-Down-Doors-And-Depriving-Babies-of-Mother's-Milk card (yes, that's you, Geraldo Rivera) is either A) lying or B) completely clueless.

The Civil War in the Middle East. No, not that one, the real civil war.