Well, it did not take long for the ridiculous to find its way into print. In what is billed as the "first independent inquiry" into the events of Sept. 11, French left-wing activist Thierry Meyssan comes to the shocking conclusion that the Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77. His book, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Frightening Fraud) is apparently a hot seller in his native land, the first 20,000 copies having been whisked off the shelves with more to follow. Meyssan, who had published his views as early as October 8 on his website, the Voltaire Network, (the philosophe must be spinning in his grave having his name appropriated by this imbecile), proves, at least to his own satisfaction, that the damage to the Pentagon could not have been caused by a Boeing 757, but was in fact the result of a carefully planned truck bombing or missile strike which was then made to look like a plane crash.
Meyssan offers as evidence a careful analysis of images of the crash site. (See "Hunt the Boeing," a site based on Meyssan's assertions and run by his son, and the point-by-point refutation here.) He also notes discrepancies in the eyewitness descriptions. (See here for a compendium of eyewitness accounts that, in fact, all pretty much agree.) Note that I haven't read the book — I'm waiting for the movie — but presumably Meyssan answers salient questions such as, if Flight 77 didn't hit the Pentagon, where is it? Where are Barbara Olson and the other passengers who left loved ones behind? If the eyewitnesses can't agree on what they saw, what was it they are disagreeing about and why are there so many of them?
No matter. Meyssan's purpose is to uncover a much deeper plot of the United States against the world. He reveals other interesting facts, like bin Laden was an agent of the U.S. who was used by President Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the World Trade Towers. Seems like a lot of effort — when Stansfield Turner wanted to do it he just fired a bunch of guys. And if the WTC planes were part of the plan, and presumably also United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, why go to the trouble of fabricating a strike on the Pentagon instead of just using another aircraft like the missing Flight 77? At some point Occam's Razor has to come into play. But to the tortured mind of Meyssan, whose other causes include hard anti-Catholicism and "rejection of a return to a moral order" it probably makes a lot of sense.
...
I was in my Washington office doing research when one of the secretaries told me that an aircraft had hit the World Trade Center. We brought the news up on the projection screen in our darkened conference room and watched the coverage, seeing endless six-foot high replays of the impacts and explosions. It was unsettling, even disorienting, but my colleagues and I were appraising it professionally, trading theories on who was to blame and how the terrorists coordinated the attacks. We did not come to any firm conclusions.
I went back to my office around 9:20. A short time later a friend of mine called, an Air Force officer, and we spoke awhile about the strikes in New York. I was standing, looking out my large office window, which faces west and from six stories up has a commanding view of the Potomac and the Virginia heights. (When I hired on my boss said we had the best view in town. True, most days.) The Pentagon is about a mile and half distant in the center of the tableau. I was looking directly at it when the aircraft struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an unrecoverable angle is frozen in my memory, but at the time, I did not immediately comprehend what I was witnessing. There was a silvery flash, an explosion, and a dark, mushroom shaped cloud rose over the building. I froze, gaping for a second until the sound of the detonation, a sharp pop at that distance, shook me out of it. I shouted something both extremely profane and sacrilegious and told my friend, "They hit the Pentagon. We're under attack. Gotta go." I hung up the phone and turned back to the window to see the dark cloud spreading. I yelled down the hall, "Look out the window!" I heard gasps outside, and a researcher dashed into my office and stared. I grabbed my bags and said I was getting out of the building and invited others to do the same. I took the elevator down and walked to the edge of the greensward, in easy view of the Pentagon across the river. I set down my bags and stood in the dew soaked grass, seeing the brilliant blue sky filling with rolling clouds of smoke. The blackness stretched south the length of the horizon. The adrenaline of the initial shock had worn off a bit, and I was able to take in the enormity of the event. Even more than witnessing the plane crash, I remember those long helpless minutes standing in the grass.
So, of course, I take it personally when a half-wit like Meyssan comes along saying it did not happen. And he is so evidently at war with reality that one is tempted not to waste time with him. His ideas are obviously foolish, easily disproved, an affront to any reasoning person. It would be easy to ignore him. But that would be a mistake. This is another front in what President Bush called "the war to save civilization itself." The history of the 20th century should show that no idea is so absurd that it cannot take destructive hold and play havoc with societies, even to the point of sanctioning mass murder. Allowing the extremists to go unchallenged only encourages them. People like Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other millennial criminals were just like Meyssan at one point in their careers. If they had been opposed more vigorously sooner, perhaps they never would have attained power. When such ideas are allowed to stand, they take root among the impressionable or those predisposed to think the worst. And especially now that communications technology has made it possible to give global reach to the bizarre and archive it forever, it is essential for men and women of reason resolutely to counter the delusions of the fringe element.
I was there. I saw it. That is my entire rebuttal.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
9/11 Denial
Never argue with the committed conspiracy theorist. James S. Robbins has this account of 9/11 and the incredibly large number of people who think its a government conspiracy.
Puke Alert from the Boston Globe
How's this for "Blame America First?:
For those with strong stomachs, read the rest.
Al Qaeda's appeal to many Muslims has more to do with the perception that the United States has become an oppressor than with the particulars of the group's intolerant worldview. This ideological battle is like a judo match in which Al Qaeda turns abuses of power by the United States against its stronger adversary. US leaders should be wise enough not to play this game.
For those with strong stomachs, read the rest.
NY Times: U.S. Soldier spying on bin Laden
Funny take-off on NY Times piece:
Read the rest...
NY Times Special Report
By B. Arnold
WAZIRISTAN—An American soldier, clinging to a cliff face littered with broken shale and animal bones in Waziristan, northwest Pakistan, is currently engaging in direct, unwarranted surveillance of Osama bin Laden, confidential sources have revealed to the New York Times.
The soldier’s conduct raises questions about the Bush administration’s policy of covert surveillance and intelligence gathering in support of his “War on Terror”. Constitutional experts are “troubled” by this and similar unwarranted searches that are designed to gather information on terrorists, but may reveal private information about American citizens instead.
“If there were an American citizen down there sunbathing in that Waziristan village next door to where bin Laden is conferring with his top lieutenants, then the Defense Department would now be passing around her photos,” said Cass Sunstein, a law professor.
Mr. bin Laden, who could not be reached for this interview, is a Saudi-born spiritual leader who, some say, was connected with the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The attack killed nearly 3000 people, many of them women and minorities. He is currently meeting with twelve lieutenants to discuss a worldwide spiritual initiative set to take place in Jakarta, Addis Ababa, Melbourne, and Houston, Texas on July 11th.
Observing the heavily guarded meeting from about fifty yards away is Lt. Thomas “Turk” Dobrovsky, of Houston. Crouched in a camouflaged “ghillie suit”, Dobrovsky adjusted a concealed antenna in an effort to record snatches of Arabic conversation in the mud meeting hall below. He is partially concealed by a rock outcropping, the one with the two scraggly bushes, but is awkwardly positioned and unable to defend himself. A burst of AK fire or an RPG from the guards below could kill him easily.
When contacted by a New York Times reporter, Lt. Dobrovsky became agitated and waved us away, and made a threatening motion by drawing his finger across his throat. In a climate of jingoism whipped up by talk radio and right-wing internet sites, such threats are not unusual. This is not the first time that journalists have been threatened by American soldiers eager to prosecute the War on Terror (see Editorial, “Trigger Happy Psychos who Hate the Free Press and the Constitution”, p.A-19.
Read the rest...
Reuters taking orders from Hizbollah
Something long suspected but now confirmed. Via the Daily Ablution:
Read the whole thing.
Reuters taking orders from Hizbollah. On August 17, Reuters put out the article below in which it said:
"There was no sign of Hizbollah guerrillas as the Lebanese troops moved south. Even unarmed members of the group seen on previous days riding around on scooters and giving instructions to journalists and residents in the south had disappeared."
Read the whole thing.
Monday, September 11, 2006
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.
"A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Orator --- 106-43 B.C.
Worth pondering.
Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the press, for they will steal your HONOR
Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the press, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse. -Mark Twain
Good quote
The NY Times Commemorates 9/11 With a Hate George Bush Editorial
NY Times 9/11 Editorial: Wrath for Bush Not Terrorists, No Thanks for Heroes
Posted by Mark Finkelstein on September 11, 2006 - 06:43.
The New York Times's 9/11 editorial is no less despicable for being thoroughly predictable.
On a day when we should be coming together, the Times does its best to tear us apart. On a day when the focus should be on the terrorists who threaten us and the brave people who have defended us against them, the Times trains all its bile on the Bush administration.
Annotated excerpts:
"Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children."
Other people's children? Perhaps the children of the people who run and largely read the New York Times don't tend to enter the military and fight and die for their country. But why would that be the fault of George Bush?
"That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft."
Even on 9/11, the Times finds a way to argue for higher taxes. And is the Times really advocating the reinstitution of the draft? Wasn't it the Times's friends in the Democratic party - led by the Times's home-town congressman Charles Rangel - who scare-mongered the draft as a Bush plot just before the 2004 election?
"When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement."
But of course that doesn't stop the Times from carefully cataloguing precisely what it sees as those sins. Leaders who believe "in ideas larger than their own political advancement": you mean like those titans of statesmanship and vision, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?
"It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction. If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances."
Not one word to remind us of the threat that faces us. Not one word of thanks for those who on 9/11 and thereafter have laid down their lives to fight that threat. For the New York Times, the real enemy isn't radical Islam, it's George W. Bush.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Rockefeller Prefers Saddam to Run Iraq
Senator Jay Rockefeller is in full propaganda mode again and the mask slipped,
“Rockefeller went a step further. He says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq” even if it means Saddam Hussein would still be running Iraq.He said he sees that as a better scenario, and a safer scenario, “because it is called the ‘war on terror.’”
McCain/Feingold Incumbent Protection Period Has Started
Something almost without precedent in America will happen Thursday. That’s the day when McCain-Feingold — aka the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — will officially silence broadcast advertising that contains criticism of members of Congress seeking re-election in November. Before 2006, American election campaigns traditionally began in earnest after Labor Day. Unless McCain-Feingold is repealed, Labor Day will henceforth mark the point in the campaign when congressional incumbents can sit back and cruise, free of those pesky negative TV and radio spots. It is the most effective incumbent protection act possible, short of abolishing the elections themselves.
Mark Steyn: 9/11 enemies are still hiding in plain sight
I suppose my I'll-never-forget-where-I-was recollections are pretty typical: a half-curious pricking up of the ears when they cut into the morning show on the radio with breaking news about a plane hitting the World Trade Center -- it sounded like a twin-prop or Lear jet -- and then the slow realization when the second plane hit that something bigger was going on. My editor called from London a few seconds later, and I switched on the TV. But, even in the midst of unprecedented forms of mass slaughter, humdrum routine goes on for the rest of us: I was having some furniture delivered that morning, and the guy interrupted me to ask where I wanted one of the pieces to go, and when I turned back to the screen only one of the smoking towers was still there. "What happened?" I said. "It fell down," the delivery guy shrugged, and ambled back to his work.
He was sort of right. It fell down, but it burned for another 100 days, as America's rage did -- for some. For others, it was already fading, the "day that everything changed" already lapsing back into the feeble passivity of one of those weird one-time-only "tragedies," after which everything goes back to the way it was.
What was taking place that Tuesday morning was, as a lot of people said, "unimaginable." But once it happened, once we no longer had to imagine it, my main memory of that day is of how quickly the mind leapt forward to encompass the new reality. When the second plane hit, it was obvious not just that this was no accident but also that it would be impossible to find two commercial airline pilots willing to fly, even at the point of a gun, their jets into skyscrapers. Which meant that, at the moment of impact, these flights must have been in the hands of terrorists who'd trained as pilots presumably for the purpose of this mission: They had acquired at least basic skills in a profession that would guarantee a good life anywhere on the planet; they could be pulling down six-figure salaries instead of Manhattan skyscrapers. But instead they went to pilot school to make one flight one time one-way, into a tall building.
And halfway across the world, on the streets of Ramallah, people filled the streets and cheered and passed out candy. They celebrated at Concordia University in Montreal, and in northern England and in Scandinavia, too, but I didn't find that out until e-mail from readers began coming through later in the day. In Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden and his colleagues followed events on the Arabic Service of the BBC. (Not all the BBC's output is in Arabic; it just sounds like it is.)
As the years go by, it's these curious examples of cultural interconnectedness that stay with me. "Interconnectedness" is the word used by the late Edward Said, the New York-based Palestinian grievance-monger and eminent America-disparager: A couple of weeks after 9/11, the professor deplored the tendency of commentators to separate cultures into what he called "sealed-off entities," when in reality Western civilization and the Muslim world are so "intertwined" that it was impossible to "draw the line" between them. National Review's Rich Lowry was unimpressed. "The line seems pretty clear," he said. "Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the West's idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam's idea."
Very true. But that may be the only "interconnectedness" a large part of the world is interested in: state-of-the-art technology in the service of ancient hatreds. Edward Said was right: There are no more "sealed-off entities." The "modern world" and the "primitive world" are more like those overlaid area codes the phone company's so partial to. So a man can roar "Allahu Akhbar!" as he plows his jet into an office building. Even the most primitive parts of the map aren't that "sealed off" these days. After all, why were they listening to the BBC's Arabic Service in Afghanistan? Afghanistan isn't an Arabic-speaking country. They parly-voo the old Pushtun and Dari and Turkmen and whatnot. But on Sept. 11, 2001, the nation was, in effect, under colonial occupation by thousands of Arab and other foreign jihadists. We think of the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistani border as a remote region of isolated peoples whose rituals have been unchanged for centuries. Yet the truth is that these village tribal cultures have been wholly subverted by Saudi money and ideology. The House of Saud's toxic kingdom, a land where the beheading schedule is computerized, may be a more apt emblem of the way an "interconnected" world is heading than we like to think.
One man in the Twin Towers that Tuesday morning must have understood. John O'Neill, a dogged counter-terrorism guy with a whiff of the old-school G-man about him, had just quit the FBI and started work as head of security at the World Trade Center. He made it downstairs where the confabs with rescue workers were punctuated by the thud of bodies from the first jumpers landing on the lobby roof. In the plaza outside, body pieces fell randomly over chairs set up for a lunchtime concert. In the final moments of his life, O'Neill must have felt his world come full circle. Six years earlier (as vividly recounted in Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower) he'd organized the capture in Pakistan of Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a terrorist who'd planned to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.
In the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote: "The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination." That's not really true. Islamist terrorists had indicated their interest in U.S. landmarks, and were known to have plans to hijack planes to fly into them. But men like John O'Neill could never quite get the full attention of a somnolent federal bureaucracy. The terrorists must have banked on that: After all, they took their pilot-training classes in America, apparently confident that, even if anyone noticed the uptick in Arab enrollments at U.S. flight schools, a squeamish culture of political correctness would ensure nothing was done about it.
Five years on, half America has retreated to the laziest old tropes, filtering the new struggle through the most drearily cobwebbed prisms: All dramatic national events are JFK-type conspiracies, all wars are Vietnam quagmires. Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef's successors make their ambitions as plain as he did: They want to acquire nuclear technology in order to kill even more of us. And, given that free societies tend naturally toward a Katrina mentality of doing nothing until it happens, one morning we will wake up to another day like the "day that changed everything." Sept. 11 was less "a failure of imagination" than an ability to see that America's enemies were hiding in plain sight.
They still are.
Belmont Club: The shadow of our hand
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
-- W.H. Auden
If I had to find one word to represent the mood five years after September the 11th it would be resignation. Whatever the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have signified, they did not, as some on the Left might think, represent experiences which foreshadow a return to the 1990s. What they have proved is that the cracks in the world run too deep for anyone to predict where they may lead. Mark Steyn writing in the Chicago Sun Times looks around and finds that the combination of commercial globalization and cultural fragmentation has led, not as its admirers predicted, to a world joining hands but to a planet of tribes united only in their ability to watch, hate and destroy each other. Describing the men who attacked the Twin Towers Steyn said:
Click on the link to read the rest.
The Senate Intelligence Report Relies on Saddam's Word.
"According to postwar detainee debriefs--including debriefs of Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz--Saddam was resistant to cooperating with al Qa'ida or any other Islamist groups."
This is good enough, apparently, for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. If you read the "Phase II" report issued by the committee late last week, it is clear that the final word on Saddam Hussein's relationships with Islamic terrorists will be given to Saddam Hussein.
According to the report, the deposed dictator was asked whether he might cooperate with al Qaeda because "the enemy of the enemy is my friend." The report uncritically offers his response. "Saddam answered that the United States was not Iraq's enemy."
Of course, why not if it makes the administration look bad?
And for a lighthearted look:
Senate Intelligence Report Finds No Connection
By Scott Ott, Editor-in-Chief, ScrappleFace.com
News Fairly Unbalanced. We Report. You Decipher.
(2006-09-09) — Just a day after the Senate Intelligence committee released a report [PDF] finding no pre-war connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, aides said unpublished findings of the committee’s probe also indicate no verfiable link between the senate and intelligence.
“Senate intelligence turns out to be a misnomer, or perhaps an oxymoron,” said one unnamed aide. “Our research turned up no substantial connections…nothing but hearsay from unreliable witnesses.”
The 151-page published report would seem to refute the Bush administration’s pre-war claims of a Hussein-Qaeda link, the source said, as well as the committee’s post-war claim to be conducting a thorough investigation.
Saddam Hussein had a very trusted source inside AP
Saddam Hussein had a very trusted source inside AP, according to the translation of another of the thousands of documents captured by U.S. forces that are only slowing being made public. In this particular document, the source inside AP tells Hussein about the formation of UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection team.
So if Hussein had a credible source working for him within AP, was it a stringer in a Middle Eastern nation, an Iraqi "dissident" who had become a full-time employee or consultant to AP or a regular AP employee whose decades of agreement with the "Blame America First" school of foreign policy led to a decision to aid one of America's enemies?
Is this individual still employed by AP? Has this individual gone on to work for another U.S. media organization like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, etc.?
Everything AP reported about Iraq prior to and likely afterwards about everything connected with Hussein and Iraq is now subject to doubt as to its credibility. AP owes its customers in the news industry and its readers in the American public a complete explanation of what it will or already has done about the spy within its ranks.
And one more thought: There remain thousands of untranslated documents. We still do not know with any certainty whether in fact Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Go here to read The American Thinker's translation of the key passages of the Iraqi document.
Saturday, September 09, 2006
Fabricating the Senate Phase II Report
It seems that the MSM is doing with the Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II Report what they did with the Plame investigation. In other words, lying about the report in order to make the Bush Administration look bad.
Ann Coulter’s September 6th column has a great example of how the media can lie while every word is “true.”
Keep an eye on the unfolding story from the Phase II reports and form your own opinions.
Ann Coulter’s September 6th column has a great example of how the media can lie while every word is “true.”
This is like saying: "John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan; Reagan later died." Every word of that is true, but what it implies — that Hinckley killed Reagan — is false.
Keep an eye on the unfolding story from the Phase II reports and form your own opinions.
Peggy Noonan: The sounds of 9/11, beyond the metallic roar.
This brought tears to my eyes. I reproduce it in full:
I Just Called to Say I Love You
The sounds of 9/11, beyond the metallic roar.
Friday, September 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Everyone remembers the pictures, but I think more and more about the sounds. I always ask people what they heard that day in New York. We've all seen the film and videotape, but the sound equipment of television crews didn't always catch what people have described as the deep metallic roar.
The other night on TV there was a documentary on the Ironworkers of New York's Local 40, whose members ran to the site when the towers fell. They pitched in on rescue, then stayed for eight months to deconstruct a skyscraper some of them had helped build 35 years before. An ironworker named Jim Gaffney said, "My partner kept telling me the buildings are coming down and I'm saying 'no way.' Then we heard that noise that I will never forget. It was like a creaking and then the next thing you felt the ground rumbling."
Rudy Giuliani said it was like an earthquake. The actor Jim Caviezel saw the second plane hit the towers on television and what he heard shook him: "A weird, guttural discordant sound," he called it, a sound exactly like lightning. He knew because earlier that year he'd been hit. My son, then a teenager in a high school across the river from the towers, heard the first plane go in at 8:45 a.m. It sounded, he said, like a heavy truck going hard over a big street grate.
I think too about the sounds that came from within the buildings and within the planes--the phone calls and messages left on answering machines, all the last things said to whoever was home and picked up the phone. They awe me, those messages.
Something terrible had happened. Life was reduced to its essentials. Time was short. People said what counted, what mattered. It has been noted that there is no record of anyone calling to say, "I never liked you," or, "You hurt my feelings." No one negotiated past grievances or said, "Vote for Smith." Amazingly --or not--there is no record of anyone damning the terrorists or saying "I hate them."
No one said anything unneeded, extraneous or small. Crisis is a great editor. When you read the transcripts that have been released over the years it's all so clear.
Flight 93 flight attendant Ceecee Lyles, 33 years old, in an answering-machine message to her husband: "Please tell my children that I love them very much. I'm sorry, baby. I wish I could see your face again."
Thirty-one-year-old Melissa Harrington, a California-based trade consultant at a meeting in the towers, called her father to say she loved him. Minutes later she left a message on the answering machine as her new husband slept in their San Francisco home. "Sean, it's me, she said. "I just wanted to let you know I love you."
Capt. Walter Hynes of the New York Fire Department's Ladder 13 dialed home that morning as his rig left the firehouse at 85th Street and Lexington Avenue. He was on his way downtown, he said in his message, and things were bad. "I don't know if we'll make it out. I want to tell you that I love you and I love the kids."
Firemen don't become firemen because they're pessimists. Imagine being a guy who feels in his gut he's going to his death, and he calls on the way to say goodbye and make things clear. His widow later told the Associated Press she'd played his message hundreds of times and made copies for their kids. "He was thinking about us in those final moments."
Elizabeth Rivas saw it that way too. When her husband left for the World Trade Center that morning, she went to a laundromat, where she heard the news. She couldn't reach him by cell and rushed home. He'd called at 9:02 and reached her daughter. The child reported, "He say, mommy, he say he love you no matter what happens, he loves you." He never called again. Mrs. Rivas later said, "He tried to call me. He called me."
There was the amazing acceptance. I spoke this week with a medical doctor who told me she'd seen many people die, and many "with grace and acceptance." The people on the planes didn't have time to accept, to reflect, to think through; and yet so many showed the kind of grace you see in a hospice.
Peter Hanson, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175 called his father. "I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building," he said. "Don't worry, Dad--if it happens, it will be very fast." On the same flight, Brian Sweeney called his wife, got the answering machine, and told her they'd been hijacked. "Hopefully I'll talk to you again, but if not, have a good life. I know I'll see you again some day."
There was Tom Burnett's famous call from United Flight 93. "We're all going to die, but three of us are going to do something," he told his wife, Deena. "I love you, honey."
These were people saying, essentially, In spite of my imminent death, my thoughts are on you, and on love. I asked a psychiatrist the other day for his thoughts, and he said the people on the planes and in the towers were "accepting the inevitable" and taking care of "unfinished business." "At death's door people pass on a responsibility--'Tell Billy I never stopped loving him and forgave him long ago.' 'Take care of Mom.' 'Pray for me, Father. Pray for me, I haven't been very good.' " They address what needs doing.
This reminded me of that moment when Todd Beamer of United 93 wound up praying on the phone with a woman he'd never met before, a Verizon Airfone supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. She said later that his tone was calm. It seemed as if they were "old friends," she later wrote. They said the Lord's Prayer together. Then he said "Let's roll."
This is what I get from the last messages. People are often stronger than they know, bigger, more gallant than they'd guess. And this: We're all lucky to be here today and able to say what deserves saying, and if you say it a lot, it won't make it common and so unheard, but known and absorbed.
I think the sound of the last messages, of what was said, will live as long in human history, and contain within it as much of human history, as any old metallic roar.
Why I Blog.
I am told that there are now millions of blogs. According to Lance Tracey there were over 50 million, worldwide in mid-2005.
That’s just a guesstimate because no one is keeping track.
Since I have seen just a few blogs – and only those that interest me – I will accept on faith the claim that most blogs are intensely personal. Most blogs – I am told are about our trips, about ourselves, about our family, as a way of keeping in touch. They are often personal diaries, left open for strangers to read.
I blog for a different reason. It’s partly for my acquaintances, sharing with them – via links to interesting articles – my interest in history and politics. But it’s partly for myself. It’s a place where I gather those things that are true and current so that, as the spinners and the snake-oil-salesmen try to rewrite history – to airbrush the past – I have a way of checking in with reality.
I am reminded of this by the current controversy over the movie that’s going to be aired by ABC on Sunday: “The Path to 9/11” as well as the recent report from the Senate Intelligence committee.
Regarding the lead-up to 9/11, I have yet to hear anyone make a credible statement anticipating this attack, and I include myself. I recall my brother-in-law making a comment about Bin laden late in the 1990s. I scoffed. What can a bearded camel herder hiding out in some God-forsaken hellhole in Africa or Asia do to us, I asked.
On 9/11 I found out.
And I changed my views. I also realized that people who were capable of killing thousands of people even while dying themselves were very dangerous in a world where technology allows one man to destroy a city. I also realized that threats and deterrence does not work against people who are willing, even anxious, to die. And I realized that there was a religion that was creating these people literally by the millions.
That religion rules the Middle East, and much of Africa and Asia. It was not an isolated band named Al Qaeda, headed by a solitary figure named Bin Laden. It was an entire culture, a religious movement and a mindset. And thanks to technology and the economic interdependence of the world, no nation, especially America, can withdraw behind its borders and oceans, pull up the welcome mat, and go back to the way it was.
And I also realized that the treat could not be stopped within our country because the enemy is too ruthless, too willing to die, to motivated. And the enemy had allies who ruled counties that had used WMDs and were perfectly capable of making more. The only thing we could do is take the fight to the enemy. So we opened one theater of that fight in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. But those will not be the end because this is a truly a global war; perhaps even more global than the last one because this time America will be a battleground.
So we live in perilous times, made more perilous by the fact that many people, for reasons of politics or for psychological reasons, don’t see this. And as a result, the West may lose this war. And the loss may be so gradual that we won’t even notice.
But I do not despair because I believe that there are enough good people in the West that we will prevail, but the fight will be bloody – both physically and spiritually.
In the meantime, this blog is a record, think of it as a newspaper archive, easily searched. That consists of contemporary records of what was said and done, so that the spinners and the lairs will have harder time of it.
It’s a little thing, but it’s mine.
That’s just a guesstimate because no one is keeping track.
Since I have seen just a few blogs – and only those that interest me – I will accept on faith the claim that most blogs are intensely personal. Most blogs – I am told are about our trips, about ourselves, about our family, as a way of keeping in touch. They are often personal diaries, left open for strangers to read.
I blog for a different reason. It’s partly for my acquaintances, sharing with them – via links to interesting articles – my interest in history and politics. But it’s partly for myself. It’s a place where I gather those things that are true and current so that, as the spinners and the snake-oil-salesmen try to rewrite history – to airbrush the past – I have a way of checking in with reality.
I am reminded of this by the current controversy over the movie that’s going to be aired by ABC on Sunday: “The Path to 9/11” as well as the recent report from the Senate Intelligence committee.
Regarding the lead-up to 9/11, I have yet to hear anyone make a credible statement anticipating this attack, and I include myself. I recall my brother-in-law making a comment about Bin laden late in the 1990s. I scoffed. What can a bearded camel herder hiding out in some God-forsaken hellhole in Africa or Asia do to us, I asked.
On 9/11 I found out.
And I changed my views. I also realized that people who were capable of killing thousands of people even while dying themselves were very dangerous in a world where technology allows one man to destroy a city. I also realized that threats and deterrence does not work against people who are willing, even anxious, to die. And I realized that there was a religion that was creating these people literally by the millions.
That religion rules the Middle East, and much of Africa and Asia. It was not an isolated band named Al Qaeda, headed by a solitary figure named Bin Laden. It was an entire culture, a religious movement and a mindset. And thanks to technology and the economic interdependence of the world, no nation, especially America, can withdraw behind its borders and oceans, pull up the welcome mat, and go back to the way it was.
And I also realized that the treat could not be stopped within our country because the enemy is too ruthless, too willing to die, to motivated. And the enemy had allies who ruled counties that had used WMDs and were perfectly capable of making more. The only thing we could do is take the fight to the enemy. So we opened one theater of that fight in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. But those will not be the end because this is a truly a global war; perhaps even more global than the last one because this time America will be a battleground.
So we live in perilous times, made more perilous by the fact that many people, for reasons of politics or for psychological reasons, don’t see this. And as a result, the West may lose this war. And the loss may be so gradual that we won’t even notice.
But I do not despair because I believe that there are enough good people in the West that we will prevail, but the fight will be bloody – both physically and spiritually.
In the meantime, this blog is a record, think of it as a newspaper archive, easily searched. That consists of contemporary records of what was said and done, so that the spinners and the lairs will have harder time of it.
It’s a little thing, but it’s mine.
As for me, I'm betting on America winning.
"JohnHuang" Comments on FreeRepublic:
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
That libbies have gone just about as bananas as you can go on the terror issue isn't debatable, but just for laughs, take their latest salvo in their war on the war on Islamic terror -- their newly released 'assessment.' The 'assessment' is an update of an earlier assessment, taking into account the changing nature and tactics of the enemy -- Bush and his evil doers. First, keep these in mind: No terrorist strike on U.S. soil since 9/11; America on offense overseas; a slew of terror plots foiled; a slew of domestic terror cells busted; 8 out of 10 al-Qaeda honchos nabbed or pushing up daisies; head-hacker leadership gummed up; massive cuts in al-Qaeda work force; AQ Khan's doomsday cartel kaput; Libya's doomsday weapons dismantled. If you're al-Qaeda these days, moving money and communicating are harder to do.
In direct response to all this, Democrats call on Rumsfeld to resign. Nothing new there. The DeMunichcrats have been calling on Rummy to resign for years now. The Taliban regime gets licked in three weeks, took too long -- Dems demand Rummy's resignation. Saddam's regime gets routed in three weeks, could've been done in two -- Dems demand Rummy's resignation. Smooth elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dems demand Rummy LEAVE NOW! Problem is, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda want Rummy fired, too. Losers are always quick to dispense helpful advice for the winning team. Touching. That the Dems, the Taliban and al-Qaeda want Rummy's head might suggest we should make the Alfa male/heartthrob/lady slayer America's Defense chief for life.
You Can't Get Away With Lying ... Unless You're A Democrat or a Media Man ... but I Repeat Myself.
Central Argument? [Jonah Goldberg]
UPDATE:
From the Weekly Standard via FreeRepublic, Steve Hayes:
From a reader:
Jonah:
Much of the press (ABC, CBS, CNN) were stating yesterday that a "central argument" made by the White House for removing Saddam Hussein from power was the alliance or links between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
Granted, the White House has made the claim that al-Qaeda and Iraq has some sort of "relationship."
But was it a "central argument" for the war?
Remember the Iraq war resolution that Congress voted on? A resolution that the press, in reporting on this story, didn't mention?
Here:
http://hnn.us/articles/1282.html
Nowhere in the resolution does it say that one of the reasons, much less a central or key reason, for liberating Iraq was the cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The only reference to al-Qaeda in the resolution reads:
Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
So, the actual law authorizing force never states that al-Qaeda and Iraq were allied.
Curious omission by the members of the Fourth Estate.
UPDATE:
From the Weekly Standard via FreeRepublic, Steve Hayes:
NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO, in the introduction to an hour-long PBS documentary called Saddam's Ultimate Solution, former Clinton State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said:
"Tonight, we examine the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Ten years after the Gulf War and Saddam is still there and still continues to stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Now there are suggestions he is working with al Qaeda, which means the very terrorists who attacked the United States last September may now have access to chemical and biological weapons."
The documentary, broadcast on July 11, 2002, laid out in exhaustive detail alleged Iraqi connections with al Qaeda. Rubin noted in his introduction that the report contained "disturbing allegations, some of which are hard to prove." But, he added, such allegations "are important enough to be fully explored and investigated...
Later that spring, the Clinton Justice Department prepared an indictment of Osama bin Laden. The relevant passage, prominently placed in the fourth paragraph, reads:Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq.
And Christopher Hitchins in Slate asks - and answers - the question:Guess who used to believe in the Iraq/al-Qaida connection?
The Road to 9/11. The Internet Has a Long Memory. Historical Revisionism Will Be Harder In the Future.
The Democrats are spinning like they have not done since Clinton spilled his “essence” on Monica and Maddy Albright went before the cameras to vouch for Bill’s purity.
Thanks to the Internet’s institutional memory, lying has been made a little harder. Of course Clinton’s herd is all over the airwaves, along with Bill himself saying “we” haven’t seen “The Path to 9/11.” I guess it depends on the meaning of “we.”
The scene in the movie that shows Sandy Burglar hanging up on a CIA agent when Bin Laden is surrounded and they are prepared to kill or capture him is a fictionalized version of reality; a composite of several attempts to take Bin laden that were scrubbed by the Clinton Administration.
But the reality is every bit a damning. Click HERE for a link to a video.
Then look at the transcript of a Hardball interview with the top CIA agent following Bin Laden.
The Clinton administration at work: They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard. Repeat that to yourself. Then cry for the thousands that have died for this fool and his reptilian acolytes.
Thanks to the Internet’s institutional memory, lying has been made a little harder. Of course Clinton’s herd is all over the airwaves, along with Bill himself saying “we” haven’t seen “The Path to 9/11.” I guess it depends on the meaning of “we.”
The scene in the movie that shows Sandy Burglar hanging up on a CIA agent when Bin Laden is surrounded and they are prepared to kill or capture him is a fictionalized version of reality; a composite of several attempts to take Bin laden that were scrubbed by the Clinton Administration.
But the reality is every bit a damning. Click HERE for a link to a video.
Then look at the transcript of a Hardball interview with the top CIA agent following Bin Laden.
Next up: an interview with Former CIA dude Michael Scheuer, whom Osama doesn’t like very much, on Hardball last summer, all emphasis mine:
O‘DONNELL: But many people have made the impression that something in the Bush administration was done wrong. But there‘s evidence that the Clinton administration knew full well that bin Laden had the wherewithal and was planning to attack the United States. Who is to blame and did the president, Clinton, get this information?
SCHEUER: Certainly the president got the information. And most certainly his closest adviser, Sandy Berger and Mr. Clarke—Richard Clarke, had the information from 1996 forward that bin Laden intended to attack the United States. There‘s no question of that. And in terms of which administration had more chances, Mr. Clinton‘s administration had far more chances to kill Osama bin Laden than Mr. Bush has until this day.
O‘DONNELL: That‘s very interesting. I don‘t think that many Americans know that or think that everything that they‘ve heard—you‘ve spent your life tracking Osama bin Laden. From what we know now and what you know, how many missed opportunities were there to prevent the 9/11 attacks?
SCHEUER: Well, we had—the question of whether or not we could have prevented the attacks is one you could debate forever. But we had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act. [N.B.; Contrast this statement with the last sentence of the WaPo article above, about not knowing where Osama was—See Dub]
O‘DONNELL: What—who then is to blame? I think the American people want to know, then, who then is to blame for this?
SCHEUER: It can only be the policy-makers and the elected officials.…
O‘DONNELL: So what you‘re saying is that when you ran the bin Laden desk, you knew where bin Laden was. You knew that bin Laden was trying to attack the United States. You knew that bin Laden had the wherewithal and that the policy-makers in the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration did not heed your warnings?
SCHEUER: Not my warnings. I hate to make myself the center of anything, ma‘am. But the intelligence community as a whole had warned the administration repeatedly. And I think there‘s no lack of record of that. It just—the 9/11 Commission failed to find anyone responsible for anything. The CIA can‘t order an attack. Only the National Security Council and the president can order an attack. …
…The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers.
When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden‘s safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.Hmmm.…what a perfect excuse the Party of the Left has given us today to dredge up and dust off—literally, in my case—the cataclysmic folly of a “law-enforcement approach to terrorism”. In fact, what a great excuse to dig through the last Democratic administration’s record of fecklessness, fumbling, and failure against Islamic terrorism.
Rove, you magnificent bastard, it worked!
The Clinton administration at work: They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn‘t irritate his beard. Repeat that to yourself. Then cry for the thousands that have died for this fool and his reptilian acolytes.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Mark Steyn: Straight-talking PM (John Howard of Australia)
Why would gazillions of American radio listeners appreciate a line from Howard? Because he says things that none of their own leaders ever quite say. Last week it was the stuff about Muslim immigrants needing to learn English and making sure they're cool with this equal-rights-for-women business. The soi-disant arrogant Texas cowboy rarely shoots from the lip like that. Instead, he says things such as: "Freedom is the desire of every human heart."
Look, I'm a supporter of the Bush doctrine to spread liberty throughout the Muslim world, but I support it on hard-headed grounds of national security. You only have to watch a couple of minutes of the lads in Gaza and southern Lebanon on the telly every night to realise freedom comes pretty low down on the list of their hearts' desires. So, when the US President insists on reprising the line week in week out, he begins to sound utopian, if not utterly deluded. American conservatives would appreciate a rationale less hermetically sealed from reality.
Read the whoe thing.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Just One Minute Moment by Daddy
Step right up, step right up Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up.
Now you Sir, you there young fella' John Q Public is it? Well Mister Public, you look like a fine specimen of manhood, strappin' fine. Why with your muscles I bet you could hoist this here sledgehammer and make that bell ring like a telephone, sing like a fire alarm, peal like the dad-gum Liberty Bell!
And wouldn't this bee-ueatiful little lady next to you, your daughter I s'pect, wouldn't she just love it if you made that bell ring and won her this here stuffed pinata of President Bush to beat to your heart's content, or better yet, a bottle of this marvelous Oil O'Asp I'm a sellin'. Can't win if ya' don't try sir, can't win if ya' don't try.
And you young lady, Miz Public is it, or can I call you 'darlin'? Why let me guess your weight there gorgeous, one hunnert nineteen pounds soaking wet or my name ain't Honest Joe Wilson. And if you're a day over 19 why I'm a damned liar and...what's that you say, his wife, and a momma' to boot, why I doubt that, and you being hardly but a teenager.
Now you two look like smart folks, just a smart, smart couple. Moment I laid eye's on you two I said to myself, "Now there Joey my boy is a smart, smart couple, just a smart, smart couple," Yessir that's what I said. And am I right? Am I right? Am I right, or am I right? Right? Righhht. Yessir I'm right. And good lookin' too, Ummm Um!
Now just inside this tent here on my left is...it is John Q and Missus Public ain't it? Yessir I thought so. Well John, and Q darlin, if you'll pardon my French, this is your lucky day, 'cause today, this special day, this just once in a lifetime opportunity day we've got...we've got...we've got a show so amazing and incredible, that it's been swallered' hook, line and sinker by not 1, not 2 but 3 Major TV Networks, plus 2 itty bitty ones, and all 479 editorial boards across this fruited plain, as God's Honest Truth these past 3 years.
First up, wearin' nothin' but her fair vanity, we've got the bodacious Princess Valerie, all the way from Foggy Bottom, wrapped in a love embrace with a 2 headed Boa Constrictor named Kristof and Corn.
Next is that fabulous India Rubber Man, Andrew Sullivan. You'll laugh, you'll cry, as he contorts his political positions so bad he don't even need a partner to commit sodomy!
Then watch in stunned belief as the great Expectorator hisself, Chrissy Matthews, spits a full 4 feet across a TV round table and hits Michelle Malkin square in the kisser.
Ooooo, then things'll turn spooky as our very own Ghost of Christmas Past, Lawrence O'Donnell, travels back through time to reveal, from a magic list in his coatpocket, the 22 Rethuglican Conspirator's indicted on Fitzmas 2 Years Ago!
Your heart now poundin' like racehorses folk's, we'll slow it down. For comic relief we've got our favorite 600 pound pig, The Old Gray Lady, and you'll die laughing as our 3 clowns, Krugman, Rich and MoDo, try to catch that old sow and put lipstick on her. Wheww, tear's in my eye's just thinkin' bout it, 'scuse me a sec.
Next we'll spring the lovely Miz Andrea on you, able to develop amnesia quicker 'n any human being ever, dead or alive. And don't kid yourself thinkin she can't multiply 1 X 2 X 6, nunh, unh.
But what's a show without acts of courage you ask. We got...wait for it, wait for it now...all the way from Viet Nam via the Queen O' England, we got us Sir Dickless Rich Armitage himself, off in the corner there polishing his personal bravery. This critter is such a mystifying mess of incorruptiblity that he's able to effortlessly reveal unauthorized gossip 'bout CIA ops to every Tom, Dick and Harry reporter in the U. S. of A, yet breathes not a single solitary word to The President when ordered to come clean. Why if I could bottle such bravery I'd add it to my Sna..er Oil O' Asp concoction folks. Dick's a real charmer, big media favorite.
Then last but not least, a scene guaranted to scare the Be-jesus outta' you or your money back, we offer...The Cabal. That's right THE CABAL, pure concentrated essence o' evil itself! Here you'll see a 57 year old Jew named Scooter recitin' poetry 'bout Aspen trees as he out's a covert CIA agent. Absolutely horrifying. And if that don't completely terrorize ya', then you'll witness a scene even more horrendous, a Behestin' Dick Cheney loading a shotgun while drinkin' a beer! Cross my heart and hope to die folks if that ain't Gospel. 'Scuse me while I shudder.
And then last but not least, a spectacle most folks'll never even dream of, never even imagine could have existed. Yessir, guaranted to send shivers down the backs of grown men and make women and children weep like heifer cows, we present...seeing's believin' folks, seing's believin',...the one and only Puppet Master himself, a frog marching Karl Rove just a daring his telephone to ring. Why terrifies a body just to contemplate such a thing. The hair on my neck's rising up like the dead in a graveyard come 'Pocalypse Day' even as I speak it. Yesiree, if you're man enough step right up, step right up right now Ladies and Gentlemen.
Koolaid's on your right as you enter.
Now you Sir, you there young fella' John Q Public is it? Well Mister Public, you look like a fine specimen of manhood, strappin' fine. Why with your muscles I bet you could hoist this here sledgehammer and make that bell ring like a telephone, sing like a fire alarm, peal like the dad-gum Liberty Bell!
And wouldn't this bee-ueatiful little lady next to you, your daughter I s'pect, wouldn't she just love it if you made that bell ring and won her this here stuffed pinata of President Bush to beat to your heart's content, or better yet, a bottle of this marvelous Oil O'Asp I'm a sellin'. Can't win if ya' don't try sir, can't win if ya' don't try.
And you young lady, Miz Public is it, or can I call you 'darlin'? Why let me guess your weight there gorgeous, one hunnert nineteen pounds soaking wet or my name ain't Honest Joe Wilson. And if you're a day over 19 why I'm a damned liar and...what's that you say, his wife, and a momma' to boot, why I doubt that, and you being hardly but a teenager.
Now you two look like smart folks, just a smart, smart couple. Moment I laid eye's on you two I said to myself, "Now there Joey my boy is a smart, smart couple, just a smart, smart couple," Yessir that's what I said. And am I right? Am I right? Am I right, or am I right? Right? Righhht. Yessir I'm right. And good lookin' too, Ummm Um!
Now just inside this tent here on my left is...it is John Q and Missus Public ain't it? Yessir I thought so. Well John, and Q darlin, if you'll pardon my French, this is your lucky day, 'cause today, this special day, this just once in a lifetime opportunity day we've got...we've got...we've got a show so amazing and incredible, that it's been swallered' hook, line and sinker by not 1, not 2 but 3 Major TV Networks, plus 2 itty bitty ones, and all 479 editorial boards across this fruited plain, as God's Honest Truth these past 3 years.
First up, wearin' nothin' but her fair vanity, we've got the bodacious Princess Valerie, all the way from Foggy Bottom, wrapped in a love embrace with a 2 headed Boa Constrictor named Kristof and Corn.
Next is that fabulous India Rubber Man, Andrew Sullivan. You'll laugh, you'll cry, as he contorts his political positions so bad he don't even need a partner to commit sodomy!
Then watch in stunned belief as the great Expectorator hisself, Chrissy Matthews, spits a full 4 feet across a TV round table and hits Michelle Malkin square in the kisser.
Ooooo, then things'll turn spooky as our very own Ghost of Christmas Past, Lawrence O'Donnell, travels back through time to reveal, from a magic list in his coatpocket, the 22 Rethuglican Conspirator's indicted on Fitzmas 2 Years Ago!
Your heart now poundin' like racehorses folk's, we'll slow it down. For comic relief we've got our favorite 600 pound pig, The Old Gray Lady, and you'll die laughing as our 3 clowns, Krugman, Rich and MoDo, try to catch that old sow and put lipstick on her. Wheww, tear's in my eye's just thinkin' bout it, 'scuse me a sec.
Next we'll spring the lovely Miz Andrea on you, able to develop amnesia quicker 'n any human being ever, dead or alive. And don't kid yourself thinkin she can't multiply 1 X 2 X 6, nunh, unh.
But what's a show without acts of courage you ask. We got...wait for it, wait for it now...all the way from Viet Nam via the Queen O' England, we got us Sir Dickless Rich Armitage himself, off in the corner there polishing his personal bravery. This critter is such a mystifying mess of incorruptiblity that he's able to effortlessly reveal unauthorized gossip 'bout CIA ops to every Tom, Dick and Harry reporter in the U. S. of A, yet breathes not a single solitary word to The President when ordered to come clean. Why if I could bottle such bravery I'd add it to my Sna..er Oil O' Asp concoction folks. Dick's a real charmer, big media favorite.
Then last but not least, a scene guaranted to scare the Be-jesus outta' you or your money back, we offer...The Cabal. That's right THE CABAL, pure concentrated essence o' evil itself! Here you'll see a 57 year old Jew named Scooter recitin' poetry 'bout Aspen trees as he out's a covert CIA agent. Absolutely horrifying. And if that don't completely terrorize ya', then you'll witness a scene even more horrendous, a Behestin' Dick Cheney loading a shotgun while drinkin' a beer! Cross my heart and hope to die folks if that ain't Gospel. 'Scuse me while I shudder.
And then last but not least, a spectacle most folks'll never even dream of, never even imagine could have existed. Yessir, guaranted to send shivers down the backs of grown men and make women and children weep like heifer cows, we present...seeing's believin' folks, seing's believin',...the one and only Puppet Master himself, a frog marching Karl Rove just a daring his telephone to ring. Why terrifies a body just to contemplate such a thing. The hair on my neck's rising up like the dead in a graveyard come 'Pocalypse Day' even as I speak it. Yesiree, if you're man enough step right up, step right up right now Ladies and Gentlemen.
Koolaid's on your right as you enter.
Deranged Democrat Watch
From Little Green Footballs:
The Democratic nominee for Congress from Florida’s 15th district believes the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy orchestrated by Dick Cheney.
UPDATE at 9/6/06 1:08:09 pm:
And in a stroke of cosmic irony, conspiracy theorist Dr. Bob Bowman’s defeated opponent is named John Kennedy.
UPDATE at 9/6/06 1:23:40 pm:
Here’s Dr. Bob exhibiting his delusions on video: (Click on the link)
Germaine Greer on Steve Irwin
Via Tim Blair:
Why the bitterness, Germaine? Someone take a bite out of your gingerbread house?
Greer divides her time between a farm in Tuscany, an apartment in London, and a property situated on 50 hectares of Queensland rainforest. Won’t someone please think of the habitat loss?
The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin ...
Why the bitterness, Germaine? Someone take a bite out of your gingerbread house?
What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals need space. The one lesson any conservationist must labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the principal cause of species loss.
Greer divides her time between a farm in Tuscany, an apartment in London, and a property situated on 50 hectares of Queensland rainforest. Won’t someone please think of the habitat loss?
What seems to have happened on Batt Reef is that Irwin and a cameraman went off in a little dinghy to see what they could find. What they found were stingrays. You can just imagine Irwin yelling: “Just look at these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray can kill a horse!” (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn’t want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God’s sake.)That’s an innovative way to criticise someone; imagine them saying something stupid, then correct that imagined statement. The whole game of opinion writing just became a great deal easier.
San Fran Jihad: Allah Akbar Indeed
Atlas Shrugs still believes...
I may be in the minority of those that believe the San Francisco vehicular murder (and attempted murders) were a jihad here and here but I am not alone. Not by a long shot.
I received this nugget from marooned in Marin (you are not alone. Marooned maybe but not alone);
I may be in the minority of those that believe the San Francisco vehicular murder (and attempted murders) were a jihad here and here but I am not alone. Not by a long shot.
I received this nugget from marooned in Marin (you are not alone. Marooned maybe but not alone);
I am glad to see that I'm not alone in believing this is a case of jihad.
I wanted to pass on to you what I found and wrote about this weekend that still makes me think this was jihad. I found a link to a police website (which I linked in my blog post). Apparently, a police source alleged Popal chanted Allah Akbar when taken into custody, plus that "member (or members) of a high ranking position, who directly or indirectly asked, suggested or ordered that this report not be written as a hate crime or as any sort of terrorist attempt."
Chris Matthews Calling for Execution of Bush
Chris Matthews to Green Candidate Calling for Bush Execution: 'I Like You Already'
Misreporting the News, Again
The AP is not the mouth of the Democratic Party, it's simply the workplace of Liberal Democrats. Power Line has a great example, using the President's speech about the intelligence gathered from captured terrorists, ignoring the substance and leading with the headline:
"Bush Acknowledges Secret CIA Prisons." The AP's account begins:
President Bush on Wednesday acknowledged previously secret CIA prisons around the world and said 14 high-value terrorism suspects — including the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks — have been transferred from the system to Guantanamo Bay for trials.This is an absurd lede. President Bush said that a small number of high-value detainees "have been held and questioned outside the United States." This is not exactly a news flash. We knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed et al. were not at Guantanamo, and no one ever imagined that they were inside the U.S. The fact that this handful of top-level terrorists was being held by the CIA, somewhere outside the U.S., has been known and widely reported for years. President Bush declined to add anything to what has already been reported many times:
Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country.So the AP's headline and lead paragraph, suggesting that the President made some sort of guilty admission, are misleading at best. The President's endorsement of the CIA's program was aggressive and effective, but few Americans will learn about it beyond the handful who watched the speech as it was delivered.
Defeatist Democrats Aren't Anything New
Tammy Bruce quotes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is drawing a parallel between the Iraq war and the Civil War. Both had their critics but both were justified, she says.
In both cases, it was the right decision to fight and see the wars through, Rice, a southern-born African-American, said in an interview with Essence Magazine.
Asked if she still thought the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 was right, considering the cost in lives and treasure, Rice said, "Absolutely."
Rice then offered a parallel between critics of the administration's Iraq policies and "people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War (in this country) to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold."
"I'm sure that there were people who said, "why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves."
NY Times Editors Go Insane
Tom Maguire at JustOneMinute believes the NY Times editors have finally gone to cloud coocoo land...
Read the whole thing...
The Valerie Plame case has claimed another victim - the editors of the NY Times have lost their minds.
Read the whole thing...
America's Strong Hand in Dealing with the Mullahs
From the American Thinker (excerpt):
Read the whole thing...
A dangerous fatalism has gripped too many people with regard to the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons program. America holds much better cards than the mullahs. We have let ourselves be spooked for far too long. History is full of instances that instruct us in the dangers of wallowing in pessimism.
General Abel D. Streight plumbed the low point of his life in the spring of 1863. His cavalry raid into Alabama got off to a good start, but then he came to the attention of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a nightmare situation for anyUnion horseman. A four-day series of running battles followed, stretching right across the northern tier of Alabama into Georgia.
At last, on May 3rd, his exhausted horses and men able to go no further, Streight watched in despair as dozens of Confederate artillery batteries rolled past two hills flanking his position. He surrendered shortly afterward, to discover that he’d heavily outnumbered Forrest all along (Forrest was forced to draft local civilians to guard his prisoners), and that the vast array of Confederate artillery was a single battery trundled repeatedly over the same spot.
The point of this story is: never allow your opponent all the aces. Don’t assume that the odds are on his side, that he outnumbers you, can outfight you, that there’s no such thing as bad luck in his corner. The iron laws of war – the risk factors that make it such a perilous enterprise in the first place – apply to both sides.
Read the whole thing...
Ann Coulter: Joe Wilson: The End of an Error
Excerpt:
As National Public Radio described the story behind Joe Wilson's amusingly titled book, "The Politics of Truth" (available on the $1 table in fine bookstores everywhere), in May 2004:
"Last July Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times saying that this particular intelligence regarding Iraq was false. A week later, columnist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative."
This is like saying: "John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan; Reagan later died." Every word of that is true, but what it implies -- that Hinckley killed Reagan -- is false.
Take Me On A Rocket Ride
Fabulous video on the Hezbo/Red Cross fake missile attacks. Click HERE by the Jawa Report
Monday, September 04, 2006
Call me crazy. I blame terrorists: How can 36 per cent of people polled think U.S. officials knew of or participated in 9/11?
This is crazy. Despite video proof that two jumbo jets flew in the Twin Towers, there are people, many unmedicated and nor under restraint, who actually believe that 9/11 was a government plot involving the FBI, CIA and "Predator" drones - you know, the ones that are actually large toy airplanes.
Mark Steyn takes on the conspiracy theorists in his unique way:
Read the whole thing.
Mark Steyn takes on the conspiracy theorists in his unique way:
Who is A. K. Dewdney? He's an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and he has pieced together the truth about what happened on 9/11. You may be familiar with the official version: "To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter."
Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic.
...
The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran's nuclear president vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are "ready to launch a big operation" on British soil. "We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents," he added, clarifying the ground rules. "Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value."
Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes.
Read the whole thing.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
The Belmont Club: Old lamps for new
The Belmont Club: Old lamps for new
It appears that the cloud of doom that the “cultursmog” has created is getting to people even as erudite as Richard Fernandez.
It appears that the cloud of doom that the “cultursmog” has created is getting to people even as erudite as Richard Fernandez.
Doing the Enemy's Work
This is the article by David Warren that has generated so much controversy - pro and con - about the conversion of the Fox boys.
Excerpt (read the whole thing):
Excerpt (read the whole thing):
The case of the two Fox News journalists, held hostage in Gaza, is worth dwelling upon. They were released after their captors had made tapes of them dressed as Arabs and announcing they had changed their names and converted to Islam.
Lately I have been looking at the large -- at how the West is proving unable to cope with a threat from a fanatical Islamic movement, that it ought to be able to snuff out with fair ease. (See my column last Sunday.) But the large is often most visible in the small.
The degree to which our starch is awash is exhibited in the behaviour of so many of our captives, but especially in these two. They were told to convert to Islam under implicit threat (blindfolded and hand-tied, they could not judge what threat), and agreed to make the propaganda broadcasts to guarantee their own safety. That much we can understand, as conventional cowardice. (Understand; not forgive.) But it is obvious from their later statements that they never thought twice; that they could see nothing wrong in serving the enemy, so long as it meant they'd be safe.
I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths. Christianity still lives, because of such martyrs. Not suicide bombers: but truly defenceless martyrs.
You don't necessarily have to be a Christian, to be Western. Two years ago, an heroic Italian captive, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, asked to make whimpering statements as part of the video of his execution in Iraq, ripped at his hood and instead declared, "This is how an Italian dies!" to his contemptible captors. He must have upset them: for they shot him instead of sawing off his head. In making his stand for human dignity, he also turned one of their propaganda videos, into one of ours.
Questions for the New York Times
From Back Talk: A Trip down Memory Lane, discusses the NY Times involvement in furthering the lies that Joe Wilson told and the lies about the Plame leaks:
Isn't this the same New York Times that published Joe Wilson's original fabrication entitled "What I didn't find in Africa"? With these now infamous words, Wilson single-handedly launched the misguided but nevertheless surpassingly successful "Bush Lied!" insurgency:
"Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?
Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
... now that the fantasy [the Plame scandal] has gone up in a puff of smoke, the latest article in the New York Times can think of new questions only for Patrick Fitzgerald. Well, I have a new question for the editors: In light of your apparent eagerness to maliciously and fallaciously savage the reputation of your own president during a time of war, what does this whole sordid affair say about you?It seems like a fair question to me, and I am sure that an honest answer will shed light on the paper's eagerness to expose other administration "scandals" (like the NSA wiretapping program and the CIA's program to monitor the financial transactions of terrorists).
Why abduct us? We cede our values for free
Mark Steyn makes a point eloquently that I have made earlier:
UPDATE:
From Powerline:Something to die for
[referring to a story buy Arthur Conan Doyle about a party of Anglo-American-French tourists taken hostage by the Mahdists, the jihadi of the day.]
One hundred ten years later, for the Fox journalists and the Western media who reported their release, what's the big deal? Wear robes, change your name to Khaled, go on camera and drop Allah's name hither and yon: If that's your ticket out, seize it. Everyone'll know it's just a sham.
But that's not how the al-Jazeera audience sees it. If you're a Muslim, the video is anything but meaningless. Not even the dumbest jihadist believes these infidels are suddenly true believers. Rather, it confirms the central truth Osama and the mullahs have been peddling -- that the West is weak, that there's nothing -- no core, no bedrock -- nothing it's not willing to trade.
UPDATE:
From Powerline:Something to die for
Saturday, September 02, 2006
NY Times Take on PlameGate
By DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: September 2, 2006
WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — An enduring mystery of the C.I.A. leak case has been solved in recent days, but with a new twist: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the special counsel’s chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years before indicting I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, on obstruction charges.
Now, the question of whether Mr. Fitzgerald properly exercised his prosecutorial discretion in continuing to pursue possible wrongdoing in the case has become the subject of rich debate on editorial pages and in legal and political circles.
Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, first told the authorities in October 2003 that he had been the primary source for the July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak that identified Valerie Wilson as a C.I.A. operative and set off the leak investigation.
Mr. Fitzgerald’s decision to prolong the inquiry once he took over as special prosecutor in December 2003 had significant political and legal consequences. The inquiry seriously embarrassed and distracted the Bush White House for nearly two years and resulted in five felony charges against Mr. Libby, even as Mr. Fitzgerald decided not to charge Mr. Armitage or anyone else with crimes related to the leak itself.
Let's review the bidding:
A Special Council was created to find out who leaked Plame's name and whether doing so was a crime. Fitzgerald knew at the beginning who leaked to Novak. So the next question would be: did Armitage commit a crime by "leaking" that information. Since no one has been charged with that crime, we can assume that the answer is "no."
Can anyone give me a rational answer why the investigation proceeded beyond that point?
Fox Journalist Says He's 'Sympathetic' to Captors
From ABC News:
Read the rest...
Despite being taken hostage at gunpoint in Gaza by a jihadist group and held captive for 13 days, Fox News cameraman Olaf Wiig says he can't condemn his captors.
"It's really complex," Wiig said on "Good Morning America."
"In some ways, I feel such sympathy for the Palestinian cause. You know, in my heart. You know, I can't hate them for what they did. I resent on behalf of my family what they did. But there's a funny bit of me that's sympathetic to them still."
Read the rest...
Human Rights Watch vs. Human Rights. The cynical manipulation of a worthy cause has a history.
A "must read" for people who are interested in the long, twisted, history of so-called "human rights" groups including Human Rights Watch and the ACLU.
The conclusion:
The conclusion:
This was the period during which the second intifada began. It pitted a democratic state against an insurgency whose method consisted almost entirely of terrorism and whose ideology ran the gamut from authoritarian to totalitarian to nihilist. Why is it not shocking to report that Human Rights Watch, among others of its ilk, reserved most blame for the country that practices democracy and allies itself with America?
It is not shocking because we have grown all too familiar with the misuse of terms like "democratic," as in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, and "human rights" by people who harbor disguised ideological agendas. When Human Rights Watch decided in the recent war in Lebanon to treat Israel, rather than Hezbollah, as the blameworthy side, it was not acting from any logic of human rights as most would understand that term. It was upholding a long, lamentable tradition.
Morality and the UN Do Not Co-Exist
We are now told that the genocide in Darfur will not be halted unless the people committing the genocide agree.
From the Washington Post (disclaimer: no guarantee of it's accuracy):
This ties in neatly with the UN's declaration that there is no right to self defense. When threatened with death, it is out duty to die. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.
From the Washington Post (disclaimer: no guarantee of it's accuracy):
Accommodating Genocide in Darfur
By Eric Reeves
Sunday, September 3, 2006; Page B07
In the face of ongoing genocide in Darfur, the international community's failure to accept the "responsibility to protect" (that's United Nations language, officially adopted) innocent civilian lives has taken its last, abject form. The National Islamic Front (NIF) regime in Khartoum, made up of the very men who have for more than three years orchestrated the systematic destruction of Darfur's African tribal populations, has been told directly and unambiguously that there will be no U.N. peacemaking force without its consent.
This ties in neatly with the UN's declaration that there is no right to self defense. When threatened with death, it is out duty to die. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.
Red Cross ambulance driver killed, world yawns
From Yourish.com:
During the Hezbullah war, a Red Crossambulancewas supposedly fired on by Israel, and headlines race around the world, causing hundreds of fraudulent news stories, what with the ambulance having never been hit by IDF missiles. But the world still got to read about it with their morning coffee the next day.
Sometime in the last two weeks, a Red Crossambulancedriver was murdered after having been kidnapped. Nobody knows when, because nobody really noticed, and nobody really cares—because he was a Sudanese, and he was killed in Darfur. Theambulancedriver wasn’t an Arab killed by an Israeli. There’s absolutely no news value in another dead Sudanese. After all, there have already been some 200,000 Sudanese killed in the war—two hundred times the number of Lebanese killed—and nobody really cares. It hardly even makes the evening news. I could only find a dozen or so articles on Google News about it.
North Korea Understands The Significance ... of our anti-missile test
From Captains' Quarters:
Pyongyang test-fired a Taepodong-2 missile on July 4th, heightening tensions in the Pacific and raising fears that North Korea could now strike the US mainland. The TD-2 was intended to land outside of Hawaiian waters as a message to the US of Kim Jong-Il's reach in the Pacific, but it failed within the first minute of its flight. North Korea says it intends to keep testing the TD-2, regardless of the outcry in the region.
That led to the increased efforts to demonstrate the futility of the TD-2 project. After a successful intercept at or approaching the apogee of a multi-stage missile in June, critics complained that such an intercept would not adequately stop the warhead of an ICBM from wreaking havoc. This test appears to counter that criticism. The defensive system destroyed the warhead itself, a feat better than its design intended, and it shows that the US can stop at least a random missile shot, if necessary.
George Bush: The Last Barrier Against Fascism!
Powerline gives us the script of Death of a President. It turns out that George Bush was the last barrier against the Nazi regime of Dick Cheney.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Why it all happened
Roger Simon asks why the Media bit so hard on the bogus Wilson/Plame lie:
Read the whole thing...
But what interests me is how the Plame Affair fits into the whole framework. It may be opera bouffe, but it is far from unrelated to the way the press has conducted itself in recent years. Is it so different from Pallywood and the Mohammed Al Doura case, the Reuters photographs, the Jenin "massacre" and so forth - all lies swallowed whole by a gullible Western media? At first glance they would seem far apart, but in this small world one concept draws them all together - narrative. The truth is less important than the weltanschauung of the publication. But we knew that, didn't we?
...
Sure Bush made a bunch of mistakes (who wouldn't?) but it should be obvious to anyone that we are at the earliest stages of a very long war. Nevertheless, a culture of media corruption set in almost instantly that ended up creating absurdities like the Plame Affair. We are lucky this one got unmasked.
Read the whole thing...
Rumsfeld Writes Pelosi and Reed
Via Instapundit:
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Democratic Leader of the House
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Representative Pelosi,
I was concerned about comments attributed to you in the media about the remarks I recently made to the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Thought and careful preparation went into what I said. It is absolutely essential for us to look at lessons of history in this critical moment in the war on terror. I was honored by the reception my statements received from our veterans.
I am sending you the full text of my remarks because I assume your comments to the press were made in reaction to inaccurate media reports, such as the coverage by the Associated Press.
I know you agree that with America under attack and U.S. troops in the field, our national debate on this should be constructive.
Sincerely,
Donald Rumsfeld
The Waiting Game: Do we really need further convincing of the threat we face?
Victor Davis Hanson in National Review Online...
read the rest...
Hezbollah’s black-clad legions goose-step and stiff-arm salute in parade, apparently eager to convey both the zeal and militarism of their religious fascism. Meanwhile, consider Hezbollah’s “spiritual” head, Hassan Nasrallah — the current celebrity of an unhinged Western media that tried to reinvent the man’s own self-confessed defeat as a victory. Long before he hid in the Iranian embassy Nasrallah was on record boasting: “The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death.”
Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trumps that Hitlerian nihilism by reassuring the poor, maltreated Germans that there was no real Holocaust. Perhaps he is concerned that greater credit might still go to Hitler for Round One than to the mullahs for their hoped-for Round Two, in which the promise is to “wipe” Israel off the map.
The only surprise about the edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that has become a best seller in Middle Eastern bookstores is its emboldened title translated as “Jihadi” — as in “My Jihad” — confirming in ironic fashion the “moderate” Islamic claim that “jihad” just means “struggle,” as in an “inner struggle” — as in a Kampf perhaps.
Meanwhile, we in the West who worry about all this are told to fret instead about being “Islamophobes.” Indeed, a debate rages over the very use of “Islamic fascism” to describe the creed of terrorist killers — as if those authoritarians who call for a return of the ancient caliphate, who wish to impose of 7th-century sharia law, promise death to the Western “crusader” and “Jew,” and long to retreat into a mythical alternate universe of religious purity and harsh discipline, untainted by a “decadent” liberal West, are not fascists. It is almost as if Alfred Rosenberg has returned in a kaffiyeh to explain why Jews really are apes and pigs, and why we must recapture the spirit of our primitive ancestors.
read the rest...
Never Mind
Lorie Byrd in Townhall commenting on the MSM and the way it's dealing with the revelation that Valerie Plame was NOT outed by a White House cabal, but by an opponent of the war in the State Department:
And the Anchoress chimes in with Now In the News With Emily Letita.
I watched entirely too much television as a child. I was a big fan of Saturday Night Live and loved the Emily Litella character. For those unfamiliar with Litella, she was played by Gilda Radner and was a little old lady who did commentary on the SNL Weekend Update segment. She was hard of hearing and was constantly confusing words. She would rant on and on, slapping the desk all the while, about one outrage or another until Chevy Chase explained to her that, for example, the report she heard was about bussing schoolchildren, not busting them. She would pause a moment, smile a sweet little smile, look into the camera and say, “Never mind.”
There have been quite a few “never mind” media opportunites during the Bush years. They range in significance from such incorrect stories as that of the plastic Thanksgiving turkey in Baghdad, to stories such as those of widespread rape and murder in the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina. Michelle Malkin once used a reference to Emily Litella when writing about the “Gitmo Koran flushing” story. Few of the “never minds” have gotten the prominent play that the original inaccurate reports received though. More distressing is that many of them have passed unrealized at all. Instead of even a “never mind,” too often we have gotten dumb silence.
How does the news media reverse course on a story that it has reported for years as fact, when it learns, through new revelations, such as the recent one regarding Richard Armitage, that the storyline reported for so long was incorrect? Never mind?
Actually we have not gotten a “never mind” out of the mainstream media yet in the case of Valerie Plame. The mainstream media will probably never tell the true story behind Joe’s grand frog marching fantasy. It is an incredible story really -- amazing that so many in the media regurgitated Wilson’s conspiracy theories as if they were fact. It is amazing that the story took off at all in spite of contradictory statements from Bob Novak from the beginning, who claimed that Plame’s identity did not come from a partisan gunslinger and was only offered in response to his question about why Wilson might have been chosen for the Niger trip. Amazing that it continued in spite of revelations that those 16 words were not incorrect after all. Amazing that even after Joe Wilson’s statements were found to be inconsistent with documentation uncovered by a Senate committee, that the story remained the same.
The Wilson fantasy was reported for years, as fact, in countless set up pieces to fawning interviews with Wilson. That reporting had very real consequences. It was Joe Wilson's claim that Bush lied about the “16 words” that started the "Bush lied" mantra. We now know that many of the claims that "Bush lied" were actually lies themselves, but that has gotten scant little attention.
And the Anchoress chimes in with Now In the News With Emily Letita.
Warning signs
Diana West in the Washington Times:
While the kidnapping ended in the captives being released, this event was particularly disturbing to me. Physical violence, even torture is horrific enough, but there is something satanic about the rape of a man's soul that transcends physical abuse.
Read the whole thing.
It's not easy to be shocked by jihad these days, five years and numberless atrocities after the Twin Towers imploded on some 3,000 fellow citizens. That said, I admit my own jihad-fatigue was broken, shattered, really, by the "conversion" to Islam of Fox journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig videotaped during their two-week ordeal as captives of Palestinians in Gaza.
Why? Andrew G. Bostom, writing at Frontpagemag.com, tells us forced conversions to Islam "have been the norm, across three continents -- Asia, Africa and Europe -- for over 13 centuries," and cites contemporary examples in the jihad campaigns of Sudan and Indonesia. Even so, religious coercion, let alone "jihad campaigns," still seems appallingly new to us -- if by "us" I can still make myself understood to mean, generally, Western peoples in modern times. Indeed, I can't think of another hostage to jihad forced into Islam -- not even Daniel Pearl or Nicolas Berg, and not the U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran a quarter century ago.
Is this incident a tip-off to a new level of unabashed religious abuse of traditionally (once upon a time) inviolate Westerners? In the "conversion" video, we see such abuse as the American and the New Zealander sit, costumed in Arabic robes, "forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint," as Mr. Centanni later revealed. Holding up a symbolic first finger, they read their lines in both Arabic and English, proclaiming their "new" faith, declaring their "new" names -- Khaled and Ya'aqob -- and calling on President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to do likewise. I didn't see the videotape on TV (more on that below), but rather on the Internet, where, like high-tech specters, "Khaled" and "Ya'aqob" will haunt their freed selves into cyber-eternity.
It's not easy to be shocked by jihad these days, five years and numberless atrocities after the Twin Towers imploded on some 3,000 fellow citizens. That said, I admit my own jihad-fatigue was broken, shattered, really, by the "conversion" to Islam of Fox journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig videotaped during their two-week ordeal as captives of Palestinians in Gaza. …
No, it isn't the bizarre disclaimer Mr. Centanni felt compelled to append to his account of the shotgun-conversion -- "Don't get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it." While it's more than passing strange to hear a person who has been forced to choose between death and Islam flack for Islam as he resumes his life, there's something else. And it isn't praise for the "beautiful and kind-hearted" Palestinian people Mr. Centanni slathered around the microphone at his Gaza City press conference before, as Mr. Bostom noted, high-tailing it to safety in infidel-Israel.
The most shocking thing about the Centanni-Wiig "conversion" is the silence that has followed. First, there is silence from Islam. Shouldn't Muslim religious leaders, and particularly "beautiful and kind-hearted" Palestinian Muslim religious leaders, vehemently condemn the forced conversions? As Mr. Bostom put it, "Will such Muslim authorities at least recognize the acute predicament of Centanni and Wiig by issuing a fatwa stating that their 'conversion,' being under duress, was not bona fide, condemning in advance any Muslim who might now attack these journalists for 'apostasy' from Islam?"
Yes, of course, they should -- at least according to any Western understanding of compulsion and morality -- but don't hold your breath. Meanwhile, holding their breath is exactly what Western media are doing when it comes to covering (not covering) the story. Even Fox's Greta van Susteren, a tabloidesque host who never met a bodily fluid she couldn't elaborate on, went delicate on us the other night, failing, in a one-hour "exclusive" interview with the two men, to ask a single question about their religious ordeal -- presumably at their request.
While the kidnapping ended in the captives being released, this event was particularly disturbing to me. Physical violence, even torture is horrific enough, but there is something satanic about the rape of a man's soul that transcends physical abuse.
Read the whole thing.
New Enemies Demand New Thinking: The secretary of Defense clarifies and expands on what he said in his recent speeches about appeasing extremists.
Rumsfeld in the LA Times:
In speaking to our veterans, I suggested several questions to guide us during this struggle against violent extremists:
• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?
• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?
• Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply "law enforcement" problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?
• Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world's troubles?
These are the central questions of our time, and, as in all periods of conflict, we have no choice but to face them honestly.
...
Consider that a database search of the nation's leading newspapers turns up 10 times as many mentions of one of the soldiers punished for misconduct at Abu Ghraib than of Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith, the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the global war on terror.
Then there is the case of Amnesty International, a long-respected human-rights organization, which called the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay the "gulag of our times" — a reference to the vast system of Soviet prisons and labor camps where innocent citizens were starved, tortured and murdered. The facility at Guantanamo Bay, by contrast, includes a volleyball court, basketball court, soccer field and library (the book most requested is "Harry Potter"). The food, served in accordance with Islamic diets, costs more per detainee than the average U.S. military ration.
With examples like these prevalent in the world media, I do worry about the lack of perspective in our national dialogue — a perspective on history and the new challenges and threats that free people face today. Those who know the truth need to speak out against the myths and distortions being told about our troops and our country. My remarks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion conventions have generated much discussion. I encourage everyone to read what I actually said at defenselink.mil/speeches.
War or No War?
Cliff May in National Review asks the question:
It's worth reading the whole thing.
Do you honestly think the threat posed by AQ and similar groups is equivalent to the threat posed by the Nazis and Japanese in the 30's and 40's?
I responded:
No question about it. Here are half a dozen reasons just for a start:
1) Hitler did not have the access to the technology these groups have.
2) Hitler never acquired nuclear weapons.
3) Hitler did not have the kinds of fifth columns this enemy may have.
4) Hitler had a nation and a “volk” he wanted to protect, and he did not believe in an afterlife for himself or his followers.
5) Hitler never managed to kill Americans on American soil.
It's worth reading the whole thing.
End of an Affair: It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband.
The Washington Post does a mea culpa, sorta...
Included in those who took him seriously, we are not at all reluctant to add, were the editors and reporters of the Washington Post.
But a half hearted apology, if that is what it is (because the editors never come out and say so) is better than the "bury our mistakes" attitude of the remainder of the press.
WE'RE RELUCTANT to return to the subject of former CIA employee Valerie Plame because of our oft-stated belief that far too much attention and debate in Washington has been devoted to her story and that of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, over the past three years. But all those who have opined on this affair ought to take note of the not-so-surprising disclosure that the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame's cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage.
....
Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Included in those who took him seriously, we are not at all reluctant to add, were the editors and reporters of the Washington Post.
But a half hearted apology, if that is what it is (because the editors never come out and say so) is better than the "bury our mistakes" attitude of the remainder of the press.
Airbrushing History and PCing Textbooks
JEFF JACOBY in the Boston Globe writes:
Sacrificing truth on the altar of diversity
And...
Sacrificing truth on the altar of diversity
YOU'RE A publisher of children's textbooks, and you have a problem. Your diversity guidelines -- quotas in all but name -- require you to include pictures of disabled children in your elementary and high school texts, but it isn't easy to find handicapped children who are willing and able to pose for a photographer. Kids confined to wheelchairs often suffer from afflictions that affect their appearance, such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy. How can you meet your quota of disability images if you don't have disabled models who are suitably photogenic?
Well, you can always do what Houghton Mifflin does. The well-known textbook publisher keeps a wheelchair on hand as a prop and hires able-bodied children from a modeling agency to pose in it. It keeps colorful pairs of crutches on hand, too -- in case a child model turns out to be the wrong size for the wheelchair.
And...
But when reality conflicts with political correctness, reality gets the boot.
So, on occasion, does historical perspective, as for example when a McGraw-Hill US history text devoted a profile and photograph to Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman pilot -- but neglected even to mention Wilbur and Orville Wright. ``A company spokesman," the Journal reports dryly, ``said the brothers had been left out inadvertently."
Palestinian Ambulance Explodes ... Again
A comment from the replies column:
But back to the story:
And a final comment:
UPDATE:
Another comment:
UPDATE:
O Insurgente readers, welcome. Please look around. I'm pleased to have you here.
UPDATE:
Trying to resurrect their faked ambulance attack story, the Hezbos have introduced a SECOND ambulance, claiming that the first ambualnce wasn't the one hit with a rocket. It's obvious that the second one wasn't hit with a rocket either. Tim Blair has more. Dan Riehl succumbs to doubts, and begins to say really stupid things like why don’t the Israelis show video footage of them not attacking the ambulance.
Not only was the evil Zionist missile a new type that explodes without harming the interior of target vehicle, it carefully undoes the bolts holding the top light on before it penetrated the roof. Bastards!
But back to the story:
MISSILE STORY IV
A righteous tip o’ the hat to Bonjour Triteness, who suggests a complete picture of the Red Cross ambulance attack may only be achieved by combining Martin Chulov’s two reports:
* The “first ambulance”, no. 782, was speeding in a convoy AND stationary;
* The six people on board the convoy were all severely injured except Shalin the driver AND only two were severely injured;
* Shalin was protected by the driver’s canopy AND by the vehicle’s rear ramp;
* The ambulance/convoy was struck by a rocket/s AND missile/s fired by an Apache helicopter that was also a drone;
* The missile pierced the centre of the red cross on ambulance 782 AND “an explosion thundered” into the ambulance;
* Shalin “remembers nothing” after the flash-bang-crunch of the crash AND he remembers that “then there was a battle for the next hour” and “we hid in a building convinced we were going to die”.
The Australian’s readers aren’t impressed:
And a final comment:
It’s time someone asks the question. How many innocent journalistic memes must you destroy with your sadistic quoting and Googling?
Just how many, Tim?
Ten? Twenty? A hundred?
How many innocent newborn media narratives must die, before Inspector Timbo Javert finally satisfies his insane lust for “accuracy” and “evidence” and “corroboration”?
At long last, can’t you just leave your fellow journalists to follow their own bliss toward the higher truth?
I will now leave you to introspect in shame. I have a PhotoShop class to attend.
UPDATE:
Another comment:
Now, that’s what I call a smart bomb. Apparently the same evil Zionist weapon also immobilises the vehicle first, advises the occupants to get out at their leisure, gives them a cup of tea and scones for their trouble, sends them on their way, before penetrating the roof in the neatest and most symmetrical way possible, and then does not explode, so as not to inconveniently incinerate anyone or cause undue property damage. How good is this bomb? Not only is it smart, it’s polite and non-destructive. It’s a sensative, new-age, polite, smart bomb. I only wish I invented the fucking useless thing - I’d sell it like hot-cakes to the UN and make a mint.
UPDATE:
O Insurgente readers, welcome. Please look around. I'm pleased to have you here.
UPDATE:
Trying to resurrect their faked ambulance attack story, the Hezbos have introduced a SECOND ambulance, claiming that the first ambualnce wasn't the one hit with a rocket. It's obvious that the second one wasn't hit with a rocket either. Tim Blair has more. Dan Riehl succumbs to doubts, and begins to say really stupid things like why don’t the Israelis show video footage of them not attacking the ambulance.
72 Hours after Mourning Death of Wage Growth, Times Notes Wages Up with GDP Growth
Thanks to Instapundit, we learn that wage rowth is reported up by the NY Slimes only 72 hours after it was reported down. The article by Ken Shepherd with the Business & Media Institute begins:
But here is an analysis done by a self identified Liberal professor at a major California University who writes in his blog "Back Talk":
And
What a difference three days make. 72 little hours.
In that time, a New York Times reporter went from tolling the death knell of real wage growth to reporting a 7-percent wage jump over last year after inflation.“[T]he current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages,” The New York Times’ David Leonhardt and Steven Greenhouse somberly noted in their page A6 article in the August 28 edition.
Greenhouse and Leonhardt added a political spin to data showing the “median hourly wage” dipping “2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation.”
“That situation is adding to fears among Republicans that the economy will hurt vulnerable incumbents in this year’s midterm elections,” the correspondents argued before remarking that “wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product.”
But new data released on August 30 pushed Leonhardt to admit the death of wage growth he wrote about earlier might be greatly exaggerated.
But here is an analysis done by a self identified Liberal professor at a major California University who writes in his blog "Back Talk":
Is our Unhappiness Caused by "Stagnant Wages?"
If there is one theory that people are resorting to in order to explain our dour economic mood in spite of all the good economic data, it is that wages have not kept up with inflation. Even Tigerhawk uncritically buys into this theory (via Instapundit). It's a great theory, and it dovetails perfectly with the "Two Americas" speech that John Edwards used to give. I love that speech. I'd love it more if it were true. But it isn't, so far as I can tell.
I don't doubt the wage statistic, but I do question the reflexive interpretation of it (i.e., that many people are actually worse off). Don't let the media do your thinking for you. Doubt, then verify.
And
What you see is that no one is worse off, but the richer you are, the better off you are (especially during the Clinton years, during which the top 5% made spectacularly impressive gains). .... For now, my point is that during the Clinton years, we loved the economy. Now we don't. This is true even though the median-family-income story was much the same during the two eras (though it is slightly better now, overall, than it was then). If we hate our fabulous economy now because the less fortunate are not gaining much ground, we should have hated it back then, too.
In a way, though, there are two Americas, but that has been true for a very long time (i.e., it is not unique to the Bush years). The poorest among us are not gaining much ground. They didn't during the Clinton years and they aren't during the Bush years.
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