PARTY TIME

Well, the fatality total for the war in Iraq has now hit 2000. The America-hating leftwing ghouls antiwar activists hit the streets for their party today. I've been trying not to let them piss me off, but I'm not having much luck. Oh well, I shouldn't have expected anything different from these "useful idiots." This cartoon seems to sum the situation up pretty well. I wonder exactly what number of casualties would be acceptable to these clowns. Was 1,999 dead ok? Or is one too many because this was an "illigitimate" war? And speaking of illigitimate wars:




The image above found at Sacred Cow Burgers.

NERO II: THE SEQUEL

It's not like we didn't already know, but Dick Morris' latest column at Frontpage Mag confirms the suspicions many of us have harbored for years. Bill Clinton's first priority was staying in office. The good of the country was not. According to Morris, Clinton's preoccupation with keeping gas prices down as he went in to the 1996 elections hindered the US response to the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 service members.

Khobar Towers is not unique. The 1993 WTC bombing, the Cole bombing, the embassy bombings in Africa. All responded to with a non-response. Some would even argue (and I tend to agree) that the Oklahoma City bombing was another area where Clinton failed.

And lest we forget, it was during the Clinton reign that China experienced it's "great leap forward" in rocket and missile technology. All thanks to illegal transfers of technology that -- just coincidentally -- coincided with illegal campaign contributions made to you-know-who. I wonder if these guys sent him a post card from space. Or at least a thank you note. Nobody likes an ingrate.

I'd be remiss in my responsibilities if I failed to mention North Korea. Remember them? Remember that treaty President Clinton told us solved the problem of nuclear proliferation in that backward, paranoid, Stalinist workers paradise? It worked. Didn't it? Otherwise, we'd have former Secretary of State Madeline Albright telling us "I find the situation in North Korea the most dangerous in the world."

The world was going to hell in a handbasket, and President Clinton was whittling away our military in order to cut the budget, and pissing away our credibility as a military power (Somalia? Oh yeah. Didn't they make a movie about that?). Oh, and let's not forget that giggly girl he was chasing around the oval office.

For all that, Bill Clinton still manages to land toward the top of many greatest Presidents lists. I just don't get it. It really makes me wonder how historians hundreds of years in the future will explain this era. Or whether they'll even try.

TORTURE

The folks at PBS recently did a Frontline special on torture used in interrogation. One of their star witnesses was an Army E-4 named Tony Lagouranis. Lagouranis, who is apparently the one "whore with a heart of gold" amongst the Military Intelligence community, details various torture methods used by US personnel in Iraq.

Froggy has an excellent post on the subject. His take is that Lagouranis is a malcontent. I tend to agree with that assessment. Unfortunately the media -- like they always do -- just lap it up.

Check it out. And don't miss the discussion in the comments section either. Well worth the read.

Update: Mr. Lagouranis, or someone claiming to be him (I tend to believe that it probably is him) has joined the debate in Froggy's comments section.

CLUELESS NEWS MEDIA. IS THAT REDUNDANT?

Most people who pay close attention to the news consider themselves well informed. But what if their sources are less than stellar? You wind up with people who have invested a lot of effort in learning about current affairs, but are still coming up short. Moreover, they don't know how much they don't know, or how much of what they do know is flat out wrong. This is especially true in the case of current events in Iraq, as Christopher Hitchens points out in his latest column.

When it comes to Iraq, one of the most boring and philistine habits of our media is the insistence on using partitionist and segregationist language that most journalists would (I hope) scorn to employ if they were discussing a society they actually knew. It is the same mistake that disfigured the coverage of the Bosnian war, where every consumer of news was made to understand that there was fighting between Serbs, Croats, and "Muslims." There are two apples and one orange in that basket, as any fool should be able to see. Serbian and Croatian are national differences, which track very closely with the distinction between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic beliefs. Many Muslims are Bosnian, but not all Bosnians are Muslim. And in fact, the Bosnian forces in the late war were those which most repudiated any confessional definition. (And when did you ever hear the media saying that, "Today the Orthodox shelled Sarajevo," or, "Yesterday the Catholics bombarded Mostar"?)

In Iraq there are also two apples and one orange in the media-coverage basket (as well as many important fruits that, as I mentioned above, are never specified). To be a Sunni or a Shiite is to follow one or another Muslim obedience, but to be a Kurd is to be a member of a large non-Arab ethnicity as well as to be, in the vast majority of cases, a Sunni. Thus, by any measure of accuracy, the "Sunni" turnout in the weekend's referendum on the constitution was impressively large, very well-organized, and quite strongly in favor of a "yes" vote. Is that the way you remember it being reported? I thought not. Well, then, learn to think for yourself.

You can read the rest of his column here.

I have long believed that the "fourth estate" has been failing the American public miserably. I have often attributed this to their blatant partisanship. But as Hitchens points out, much of it is due to plain old ignorance.

THE FOLLY OF MODERN LEFTISM

Imagine a world where everyone is equal. Not just posessing of equal rights. Or equal under the law. Really equal. Equally smart -- or dumb. Equally athletic. Equally talented in music, art, etc. Even equally attractive. Sounds like the kind of utopia that liberals dream about, doesn't it. Well, over three decades ago someone else imagined such a world. It went something like this:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

The above is from a short story titled "Harrison Bergeron." It was written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1961. If you haven't read it, by all means check it out. It's not too long and it's well worth the time spent reading it. The whole story is available here.

STUFF

Che Guevara
Freedom fighter. Fiery revoluntionary. Architect of the worker's revolution in Cuba. Whatever you call him, there's no denying that Che is an icon of the left. College students have been wearing T-shirts emblazened with his image for years. A recent movie called The Motorcycle Diaries chronicles Che's early years as he sought his life's calling. If you want to know the real story of Che, check out this piece by Humberto Fontova in todays' Frontpage Mag. After reading this, you'll likely call Che "dead murdering commie bastard."

Alert the media!!! Um...nevermind.
The latest "scandal" that has caught the attention of the MSM is a supposedly "staged" Q&A session President Bush had with troops in Iraq. I don't know if it was staged or not, but I do know (from personal experience) that pretty much everything the Army does is staged. And I think it's common knowledge that most of what politicians do is staged. Remember these?
-Bill Clinton's sudden expression change at Ron Brown's funeral.
-His impromptu cross-making with rocks in Normandy (does the ACLU know about that?)
-His run with Navy SEALs for the cameras. As I recall, some White House hack commented that the SEALs could barely keep up with him (cough, cough. Bullshit! cough).
-Hillary's cookie recipe (yeah right, she buys 'em at the Winn Dixie in the bakery aisle).
-Hell, Bill and Hill's whole marriage is practically a staged event.

And while we're on the subject of staging things, the MSM is in no position to cast the first stone:
-Exploding trucks at NBC.
-Forged documents at CBS.
-Dan Rather's big report in the 80s on disturbed Vietnam vets that featured "veterans" who weren't even in the war.
-Jayson Blair.

Gimme freakin' a break.

Harriet Miers
I still don't know what to say about this. I'm not really thrilled with the President's choice. I wish he'd have chosen someone better. The problem is the Senate. There is no way Bush could ever get a Thomas or a Scalia through the nomination process. The week kneed sissies that pass for Republicans in the Senate are of no help at all. Like Donald Rumsfeld says, "you go to war with the army you have." Arlen Specter. Olympia Snow. John McCain. Susan Collins. Lincoln Chafee. Yup, with an army like that, you better remember to bring the white flag with you into battle. Pathetic.

"We will never back down, never give in and never accept anything less than complete victory."

Check out this speech, given by President Bush earlier today.

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century.

Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses.

Osama bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, "what is good for them and what is not." And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers.

He assures them that this is the road to paradise, though he never offers to go along for the ride.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life.

We've seen it in the murders of Daniel Pearl, Nicholas Berg and Margaret Hassan and many others.

In a courtroom in the Netherlands, the killer of Theo Van Gogh turned to the victim's grieving mother and said, "I do not feel your pain because I believe you are an infidel."

And in spite of this veneer of religious rhetoric, most of the victims claimed by the militants are fellow Muslims.

When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple; the total rejection of justice and honor and moral and religion.

These militants are not just the enemies of America or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity.

If you read nothing else today, read the rest of this speech. This is the kind of speech that the President should be giving regularly. This is how a President should sound. No "nuance." No "I voted for it, before I voted against it." No "it depends on what the definition of is is." Totally unequivocal.