Worsening Durbinopathy

Hugh Hewitt keeps after Dick Durbin over his way-over-the-top remarks about Gitmo. The longer this thing goes on without prominent Dems condemning Dick, the worse it will be politically for that decrepid, blind, angry old Party.

"The Durbin Defense League want to change the subject from what Durbin actually said to wholly different subjects. Durbin said the practices at Gitmo were like the practices at Abu Ghraib which are like the practices at detention centers around the world which are like the practices of Nazis/Stalinist/Pol Pot. Andrew Sullivan asserts that 'it's people like Dick Durbin who prove that some can actually stand up against this stain on American honor and call it what it is. Good for him. Thank God for him,' thus buying into the Nazi/Stalinist/Pol Pot comparison, which simply takes them off the field of serious argument. I have not seen a single critic of Durbin's do other than condemn the Abu Ghraib crimes, but Sullivan attempts to transform critics of Durbin's vast slander into defenders of the Abu Ghraib crimes, which is not only shabby, but transparently the argument of the hysterical."

Syria Not Giving Up

Syrian-aligned forces, probably directed by Syrian agents, are slow to release their death grip in Lebanon. Time to ratchet up the pressure on baby-Assad.

"A prominent Lebanese politician who had long criticised Syria’s grip on his country’s affairs was killed by a car bomb attack in Beirut on Tuesday, two days after the anti-Syrian coalition triumphed in parliamentary elections.

"George Hawi, a former leader of the Lebanese Communist Party, died instantly in the blast in the Wata Musaitbi district of Beirut.

"Mr Hawi’s murder casts a shadow over Sunday’s election, won by the bloc led by Saad Hariri, the 35-year-old son of the assassinated former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The victory means an anti-Syrian coalition is set to dominate parliament for the first time since the end of Lebanon's 1975-1991 civil war."

Palestinian Anarchy

Very good update on the terrible situation in the West Bank and Gaza - Abbas is losing the power struggle, and civil war is imminent.

"The power vacuum in the PA has resulted in chaos with Palestinian security commanders operating private militias bolstered by Western funding and training. Abbas, incapable of imposing authority, has been increasingly dismissed as a leader and relies on the goodwill of Hamas and other Islamic opposition groups to remain as nominal head. Hamas prefers to wait until after the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to confront Fatah on such issues as power-sharing. The movement believes that it has the armed strength and political influence in the Arab world and in Europe [32] to force a showdown with Fatah. A violent clash between Fatah and Hamas after an Israeli withdrawal is likely."

Dems Obstruct Bolton

Obstructionist Dems have filibustered against a vote on John Bolton. I'd say this action negates the McCain-brokered compromise last month, in which Dems agreed to invoke filibusters only in extreme circumstances (didn't take them long, did it?). A recess appointment by Bush does not address the core problem of a minority Party that is abusing the process.

Frist should go nuclear.

Durbin Gets Steyned

More from Steyn on Durbin and Gitmo (thanks to lgf).

"By now, one or two readers may be frothing indignantly, 'That’s not funny! Bush’s torture camp at Guantanamo is the gulag of our time, if not of all time.' But that’s the point. The world divides into those who feel the atrocities at Gitmo 'must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others' (in the widely quoted words of Senator Dick Durbin), and the rest of us, for whom the more we hear the specifics of the 'atrocities' the funnier they are. They bear the same relation to the gulags (15-30 million dead), the Nazi camps (nine million dead) and the killing fields of Cambodia (two million dead) as Mel Brooks‚ 'Springtime For Hitler' does to the original. Nobody complained at Auschwitz that the guards were playing the 78s of The Merry Widow (the Fuhrer’s favorite operetta) with the volume knob too high. When that old KGB hand Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as the big guy in the Kremlin, he was reported in the western press to be a big Glenn Miller fan. But to the best of my knowledge no-one suggested he was in the basement of the Lubyanka torturing the inmates with 'I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo'.

"The first time the full-blast junk-pop treatment caught the eye of the media was a decade and a half back, when US troops bombarded the Panamanian strongman General Noriega with the Bobby Fuller Four’s 'I Fought The Law (And The Law Won)'. In those days, nobody reckoned it was torture. But these days torture seems to be in the ear of the behearer. Because the jihadi find western culture depraved — and I’m not necessarily in disagreement on that, at least where Christina Aguilera’s concerned — we’re obliged to be extra-super-duper-sensitive with them.

"Says who? Again, the more one hears the specifics of the 'insensitivity' of the American regime at Guantanamo, the more many of us reckon we’re being way too sensitive. For example, camp guards are under instructions to handle copies of the Koran only when wearing gloves. The reason for this is that the detainees regard infidels as 'unclean'. Fair enough, each to his own. But it’s one thing for the Islamists to think infidels are unclean, quite another for the infidels to agree with them. Far from being tortured, the prisoners are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The US military hand each jihadi his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship The Times of London. When I bought a Koran to bone up on Islam a couple of days after 9/11, I didn’t wear gloves to the bookstore. If that’s 'disrespectful' to Muslims, tough. You should have thought about that before you allowed your holy book to become the central motivation for global jihad."

Downing Street Forgery?

Captain Ed summarizes the latest sordid details of the Downing Street Memo - now formally joining the ranks of Fake-But-Accurate.

"The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive.

"Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper)."

The pathetic leftist litany of cases of lying, illogic, ignorance, intellectual laziness, and questionable motives grows exponentially.

Rangel = Nutcase

First it was a comparison of our campaign in Iraq to the Holocaust. Now it's a demand for an "inquiry" into whether BUSH LIED about the reasons to go to war, based on, of all things, the entirely inconsequential "Downing Street Memo."

Charlie Rangel has officially joined the ranks of the moonbats.

The House Protects Us /Not

Hinderaker has the goods on some silly anti-Patriot Act shenanigans in the House this week:

"Several things will immediately jump out at anyone patient enough to read section 215. First, it doesn't mention libraries. It authorizes the FBI to seek an order permitting it to obtain 'tangible things,' among which are records and documents of all types. There is no obvious reason why this section should have provoked hysteria about libraries and bookstores.

"Second, the statute requires the FBI to obtain an order from the FISA court, following a procedure that was first established during the 1970s. So the FBI can't unilaterally subpoena anything.

"Third, the statute specifically provides that no such order can be based on activities that are protected by the First Amendment.

"Given these facts, and given that there has never yet been a case where section 215 has been used to obtain library or bookstore records, today's vote was symbolic, at best. What it symbolized was certain House members' commitment to 'civil liberties,' which, however, were never threatened.

"The upshot of this, if it becomes law, will be that the FBI can obtain an order permitting it to obtain possession of any tangible object whatsoever, prom any person or organization, except the records maintained by libraries and bookstores. I, as counsel of record for any party in any civil lawsuit venued in any state or federal court in the United States, can obtain records from libraries and bookstores. But the FBI can't, at least not if it is conducting a terrorism investigation.

"No doubt the House members who voted for the amendment will sleep more soundly tonight."

One For The Good Guys

Iraqi forces rescue a hostage.

" 'Mr. Wood was recovered a short while ago in Baghdad in a military operation that I am told was conducted by Iraqi forces in cooperation in a general way with force elements of the United States,' Howard said, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp (search)"

Fight Over Gitmo

Michelle Malkin thinks it's too late for damage control on Gitmo, by which she means not that the prison facility should be shut down, but rather that politically, through a particularly inept Bush statement, the momentum for closing has become, unfortunately, unstoppable.

I don't think the cause is lost yet, but the President needs to come out and forcefully support keeping the prison operational. The criticism of Gitmo has achieved levels of Pythonesque self-parody, and the critics deserve nothing but contempt, and lots of it.

Perception Vs. Reality

Superb Mark Steyn piece in The Spectator.

"Guantanamo exists in a legal limbo about which different opinions can be held. And, as in every prison camp, there are no doubt foolish and wicked things that go on. But no serious allegation of torture has been substantiated, and in the al-Qa’eda training manual found in Manchester a couple of years back Rule 18 couldn’t be more explicit: when held captive by the infidel, members ‘must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them’ and ‘complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison’. A healthy scepticism would seem to be advisable, especially when the alleged forms of torture involve lurid, if psychologically rather obvious, fantasies of menstruating Western women. Instead, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times runs around shrieking like a hysterical ninny that Washington needs to shut down Guantanamo right now — not because of anything that actually occurred there but because of negative ‘perceptions’ of the camp in the overseas press.

"And would caving in to those negative perceptions lead to any better press from the Guardian or Le Monde? Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America is being flayed as the planet’s number one torturer for being insufficiently respectful to the holy book of its prisoners, even though the Americans themselves supplied their prisoners with the holy book, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, even though Americans who fall into the hands of the other side get their heads hacked off, even though the prisoners’ co-religionists themselves blow up more mosques and Korans than Americans ever do, and even though the alleged insufficient respect to the prisoners’ holy book occurred at a rate of one verified incident of possibly intentional disrespect per year. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the torrent of rave reviews — right after the complaints that it is culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it’s the burial site of ten devout Muslim flying enthusiasts."

Team America Star In The News!

Aimee Mann's brother-in-law is suckin' up to the mullahs. I'd say he's looking for a chance to skirt the edges of Fonda-ism again.

Chinese Dawn

VDH addresses historical power shifts, and a looming enemy of the twenty first century (who is the subject of a recent revelation of intelligence failures [hat tip Instapundit]):

"China, however, is a very different story — a soon-to-be grasping Soviet Union-like superpower without any pretense of Marxist egalitarianism. Despite massive cash reserves and ongoing trade surpluses, it violates almost every international commercial protocol from copyright law to patents. It won’t discuss Tibet, and it uses staged domestic unrest to send warnings to Taiwan and Japan that their regional options will increasingly be limited by Beijing.

"China could rein in Kim Jong Il tomorrow. But it derives psychological satisfaction from watching Pyongyang’s nuclear roguery stymie Japan and the United States. China’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia is governed by realpolitik of the 19th-century American stripe, without much concern for the type of government or the very means necessary to supply its insatiable hunger for resources. The government that killed 50 million of its own has not really been repudiated and its present successor follows the same old practice of jailing dissidents and stamping out freedom. When and how its hyper-capitalist economy will mandate the end of a Communist directorate is not known.

"The world has been recently flooded with media accounts that U.S. soldiers may have dropped or at least gotten wet a few Korans. Abu Ghraib, we are told, is like the Soviet gulag — the death camp of millions. Americans are routinely pilloried abroad because they liberated Iraq, poured billions into the reconstruction, and jumpstarted democracy there — but were unable to do so without force and the loss of civilian life.

"This hysteria that the world’s hyper-power must be perfect or is it is no good is in dire contrast to the treatment given to China. Yet Pavlovian anti-Americanism may soon begin to die down as the Chinese increasingly flex their muscles on the global stage and the world learns better their methods of operation."

Obeisance Unbecoming

Paul Mirengoff makes an excellent point in discussing another article about the Gitmo hysteria.

"The left has constantly claimed that the occasional instances of misconduct directed at prisoners in the war on terror is the product of policies articulated "at the highest levels." Such claims fail to explain, for example, why the abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred at only on prison and essentially on only one shift. However, I'm beginning to find the left's claim plausible in this sense: Faced with regulations like the ones described above, and operating in the context of terrorist prisoners who find it amusing to hurl their urine and feces at guards while maintaining that guards are too unclean to handle the Koran, I might be tempted 'accidentally' to drop the Koran from time to time."

Undermining The 9/11 Memorial

I've been watching the unfolding of the Ground Zero Memorial scandal. I'm hopeful that Soros' maniacal plot will be snuffed out.

More Self-Righteous Stupidity From AI

Amnesty International's descent into irrefutable disgrace continues apace.

Again With The "False But Accurate" Malarkey?

There was a big lie perpetrated on Fox News over the weekend about homicides of military prisoners in U.S. custody around the world. Already, it has been debunked in the blogosphere (hat tip Instapundit).

The Failure of Amnesty International

And Dennis Prager focuses on Amnesty International's role in the immoral accusations against our military at Gitmo. His recapitulation of AI's descent to left-wing stupidity is dead-on:

"That devolution was most apparent years ago when Amnesty International listed the United States as a major violator of human rights because it executed murderers. The organization's inability to morally distinguish between executing murderers and executing innocent people means that Amnesty International is worse than ineffectual; the good it has done notwithstanding, it is becoming harmful to the cause of human rights."

MSM Against Us

John Hinderaker's Weekly Standard article on the idiocy of the press coverage of the so-called "Koran abuse" at Gitmo:

"It seems that the Army--or maybe it's the United States--just can't win. It is almost inconceivable that the Hood report could have been more favorable to the Guantanamo guards and interrogators, yet the international and American press treated it as a confession of wrongdoing, at times with a hint that the Newsweek allegation had proven true after all. Little (frequently, nothing) was made of the fact that it was the Muslim detainees, not American guards or interrogators, who had perpetrated precisely the acts that were the excuse for anti-American riots in the Muslim world.

"No matter how virtuous American conduct may be, the many members of the press raise the bar higher, with no regard for the realities of warfare, the inevitable sordidness of prison life, or the frailties of human nature. It is hard to see any purpose in this hypercriticism--no other country, except perhaps Israel, is held to such an extraordinary standard--other than to make it impossible for the United States to detain and interrogate prisoners. Or to fight a war."

More On Harvard's Debasement

Heather MacDonald's recent essay on Harvard's idiotic 50 million dollar "diversity" program (on which I commented previously) is getting deserved attention.

"And what does $50 million buy you? This astounding sum, offered by Lawrence Summers as a down payment on his absolution for mentioning the science of sex differences, comes without any explanation as to how he arrived at it or what it will purchase. One would hope that the Senior VP for D, whatever her exalted position and her bevy of dedicated helpers in the provost’s office, doesn’t come near to costing that amount. Given that Harvard and its competitors across the country have already beaten the bushes for years for “diversity” candidates, even $500 million would seem unlikely to produce any major change in Harvard’s 'diversity' profile.

"But the $50 million will escalate the bidding wars for the finite number of plausibly qualified women and minority professors. In the near future, Harvard’s millions will guarantee that it can rout all competitors for female nuclear physicists, but its competitors will undoubtedly up their own antes to stay in the game. There must be better ways to spend the millions of dollars that schools will dedicate to poaching 'diversity' trophies from rival institutions—buying books for libraries, for example, or grooming scholars in neglected fields such as the American founding, or producing operas on campus, or capping tuition hikes."

Another Anti-Bush Charge Fizzles

Commentary on the insignificant "Downing Street Memo." Can't Kerry and Nader find something more interesting to waste the nation's time on?

"This and other excerpts have caused a furor on the American Left. Ralph Nader is calling for impeachment (again), and John Kerry has vowed to bring the matter to the Senate floor. Of course, the memo simply contains the impressions of an aide of the impressions of British-cabinet officials of the impressions of unnamed people they spoke to in the United States about what they thought the president was thinking. It is sad when hearsay thrice-removed raises this kind of ruckus, especially since a version had been reported three years ago. As smoking guns go, it is not high caliber."

Surprise! - Times-Democrat Defends Amnesty

It's all there! The driving hostility toward the Bush administration, the complete lack of comprehension of what the GWoT is (or even that we are in a war at all), the reserved-for-ourselves-only use of the "un-American" epithet, the moving target style of argument that here brings up (yes - still!) Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base (in Afghanistan), and "other, secret locations," and of course the disingenuous, obligatory profession of concern for "finding and prosecuting the most dangerous terrorists." How perfect that The Times-Democrat rushes in not only to defend Amnesty International, but specifically to close ranks on the Guantanamo-is-a-gulag charge! After all, The Times-Democrat should know all about gulags, having covered Stalin's genocide so extraordinarily well (/sarcasm).

I wonder if any Times-Democrat readers rah-rahing this editorial this morning notice how weak its one sentence "argument" in favor of Amnesty's "gulag" terminology really is (we run a network of prisons, the Soviet gulag was a network of prisons, therefore our network of prisons is a gulag - oh, and our network is "shadowy," too). I also wonder if they realize that any damage to "America's reputation for fairness, just treatment of the guilty and humane treatment of the innocent" is by and large a product not of our conduct of this war, but of the hysterical, myopic, scandal-mongering, anti-military, consequences-ignoring coverage of non-events by MSM outlets like their beloved Times-Democrat.



P.S. It really is too bad this kind of egregiously close-minded failure of evidentiary standards appears to be out of the purview of the new Public Editor (Byron Calame), as I read between the lines of his mission statement.

Koran Abuse Confirmed!

Yes, that's right! "Abuse" of the Koran at Gitmo, confirmed by... a military investigation. Five incidents, resulting in two individuals being disciplined (one, a contract interrogator, being fired, for stepping on one of the books!). Some of the reported incidents are absurd. And there were 15 incidents of detainees mishandled Korans. The MSM will continue to play this for maximal damage to U.S. prestige and promotion of international riots, but it's all quite trivial, especially in the context of the exquisite military policy of respect for the Muslim religious text.

"In all, Hood found nine incidents alleging intentional mishandling of a Quran and confirmed five. Another 10 incidents did not involve Quran mishandling, though the report is unclear on at least one incident. Hood found that an interrogator put two Qurans on a TV set after learning that it upset the detainee to see a Quran on the set earlier.

"In two other interrogation-related incidents, a Marine inadvertently squatted over a detainee's Quran, and a chaplain reported an interrogator was tearing pages from a Quran, a charge denied by another interrogator who said the first was only turning pages forcefully."

Michelle Malkin has been all over this non-story.

VDH

Hanson provides some gems this week:

"Fourth, in an asymmetrical war the cult of the underdog is a valuable tool. Europeans march with posters showing scenes from Abu Ghraib, not of the beheading of Daniel Pearl or the murder of Margaret Hassan. They do not wish, much less expect, al Qaeda to win, but they still find psychic satisfaction in seeing the world’s sole superpower tied down, as if it were the glory days of the Vietnam protests all over again. How else can we explain why Amnesty International claims that Guantanamo — specialized ethnic foods, available Korans, and international observers — is comparable to a Soviet Gulag where millions once perished? So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West.

"In response, we have embarked on the only strategy that offers a lasting victory: Kill the Islamic fascists; remove the worst autocracies that sponsored terrorists; and jump-start democratic governments in the Middle East."

Krauthammer

CK on Gitmo:

"The most inflammatory allegations have been not about people but about mishandling the Koran. What do we know here? The Pentagon reports (Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, May 26) -- all these breathless "scoops" come from the U.S. government's own investigations of itself -- that of 13 allegations of Koran abuse, five were substantiated, of which two were most likely accidental.

"Let's understand what mishandling means. Under the rules the Pentagon later instituted at Guantanamo, proper handling of the Koran means using two hands and wearing gloves when touching it. Which means that if any guard held the Koran with one hand or had neglected to put on gloves, this would be considered mishandling.

"On the scale of human crimes, where, say, 10 is the killing of 2,973 innocent people in one day and 0 is jaywalking, this ranks as perhaps a 0.01.

"Moreover, what were the Korans doing there in the first place? The very possibility of mishandling Korans arose because we gave them to each prisoner. What kind of crazy tolerance is this? Is there any other country that would give a prisoner precisely the religious text that that prisoner and those affiliated with him invoke to justify the slaughter of innocents? If the prisoners had to have reading material, I would have given them the book 'Portraits 9/11/01' -- vignettes of the lives of those massacred on Sept. 11."

The Real Amnesty International Agenda

The other half of Amnesty International's left-wing agenda: the crimes they ignore.

The Real Watergate Tale

Here's an old Commentary article by Edward Epstein, uncovered by Scott Johnson, pointing out a general fallacy of reconstructions of Watergate; as in retelling the stories of almost all scandals, the press can't stop puffing itself up.

"Perhaps the most perplexing mystery in Bernstein and Woodward’s book is why they fail to understand the role of the institutions and investigators who were supplying them and other reporters with leaks. This blind spot, endemic to journalists, proceeds from an unwillingness to see the complexity of bureaucratic in-fighting and of politics within the government itself. If the government is considered monolithic, journalists can report its activities, in simply comprehended and coherent terms, as an adversary out of touch with popular sentiments. On the other hand, if governmental activity is viewed as the product of diverse and competing agencies, all with different bases of power and interests, journalism becomes a much more difficult affair.

"In any event, the fact remains that it was not the press which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself. So long as journalists maintain their usual professional blind spot toward the inner conflicts and workings of the institutions of government, they will no doubt continue to speak of Watergate in terms of the David and Goliath myth, with Bernstein and Woodward as David and the government as Goliath."

Yeah, That'll Attract Those Red-Staters, Howard!

More Dean embarassment for the Dems, and Hinderaker's got the scoop.

" 'You think people can work all day and then pick up their kids at child care or wherever and get home and still manage to sandwich in an eight-hour vote? Well Republicans, I guess can do that. Because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.'

"This is too absurd to require any comment, except: Is this hysterical nonsense really the image the Democrats want to present to the American people?"

Helping Bad Guys

Horowitz does a good job succinctly summarizing The Times-Democrat's offense in publishing their expose of CIA methods.

"To sum up: the New York Times is willing to deploy major resources to blowing the cover of a Central Intelligence Agency operation designed to defend 300 million Americans from the next terrorist attack -- an attack which could be a dirty nuclear weapon detonated in a major American populaton center. On the other side of the ledger, it covers up the nature and agendas of America's enemies who are working to exploit the very information the Times is providing to obstruct America's war on terror and make Americans more vulnerable to attack."

Times-Democrat Vs.National Security

Hugh Hewitt has a good question for certain elements on the left re: The Times-Democrat's continued deliberate obliviousness to national security concerns.

"The New York Times story from [yesterday] morning which blew the cover off the CIA airlines, Aero Contractors, has caused some of my readers/listeners to ask if the NYT was upset with the Novak column blowing Valerie Plame's cover? Are any of the lefties searching out the Plame leaker demanding that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into unauthorized leaks of information damaging to covert operatives be expanded to include [yesterday's] story."

Full Speed Ahead?

Ledeen worries that the GWoT is losing steam.

"The Iranian people are not deceived, and all reliable reports from Iran tell us that few of them intend to vote. Knowing this, the regime has announced that non-voters will be treated as criminals, deprived of educational opportunities, forbidden to travel, and banned from government employment. Why have our diplomats not denounced the electoral scam and the frantic efforts to compel the Iranians to act in the pathetic comedy? The most authoritative religious figure in Iran, the Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, told Reuters that the Iranians understood the election was a fraud, because the president has no authority. Khamenei holds it all. In open rebellion against the Islamic Republic, Montazeri said that the Supreme Leader 'should limit his role to religious matters and to ensuring that laws conformed to Islam.' In short, that the Islamic Republic must be dismantled. Meanwhile, the Iranians and the Syrians continue to support the terror war against us in Iraq. Here again, everyone knows it — nobody raised an eyebrow at the recent rumors that Zarqawi had taken refuge in Iran, because everyone knows he has long had Iranian support for his barbaric actions — yet our leaders are strangely unwilling to draw the obvious conclusion: The regimes must go.

"I do not understand why Bush, Rice, and Rumsfeld should be less forthcoming than an 83-year-old Grand Ayatollah under virtual house arrest in Qom. In his final days in office, Colin Powell went around the world announcing that the United States was not calling for regime change in Iran, and no one in Washington has gainsaid those words. Nor has anyone called for regime change in Damascus. In each case, official rhetoric, and apparently formal policy as well, are directed toward matters of less significance in the Global War: the nuclear ambitions of the Iranian mullahs, and the domination of Lebanon by the Syrian Baathists and their murderous Hezbollah allies. Yet it is clear to anyone with eyes to see that even these lesser goals cannot be accomplished so long as Assad rules Syria, and the mullahs rule Iran."

Reality, Please

Michelle Malkin provides a dose of reality on Gitmo.

Anti-Americanism, Unleashed

VDH lets 'em have it:

"The anti-Americanism that we frequently see and hear, then, is often a plaything of the international elite — a corporate grandee, a leisured athlete, or a refined novelist who flies in and out of the West, counts on its globalizing appendages for wealth, and then mocks those who make it all possible — but never to the point that their own actions would logically follow their rhetoric and thus cost them so dearly.

"We might expect that a chagrined Ms. Nooyi would resign from Pepsi since it is the glossy fingernail of the American middle finger that apparently so bothers her. We pray that Mr. Khan will stay among the mobs and rioters of the madrassas and mosques he stirred up. Perhaps novelist Roy can write in an indigenous Indian language, peddle her books at home, and thereby disinvest from this hegemonic system that drives her to fury.

"Then there is the director of anti-American films from Denmark, Lars von Trier, who whined, 'Mr. Bush is an a**hole. So much in Denmark is American. . . America fills about 60 per cent of my brain. So, in fact, I am American. But I can't go there to vote and I can't change anything, because I am from a small country. So that is why I make films about America.'

"Memo to poor head-pounding Mr. von Trier: There is no compelling reason to have anything American in your country — except in the past to expel German invaders you either could not or would not keep out. Simply stop buying American. Don’t watch American movies. Admonish not us, but your own leaders to get out of NATO, pronto — the faster the better. Deny entry to all American troops — and tourists. Embrace the EU. It’s bigger and more populous than the U.S. Create an all-EU defense force. Go for it all!

"Above all, be sure that your films are not marketed through any global organization that is either American-financed, directed, or substantiates a Westernized hegemony in the promulgation of intellectual property. Perhaps there are plenty of Danes who would see your films about Denmark at home — and that might cleanse your brain of what you hate, if make you a little less money."

Dems Obstruct

If it walks like a filibuster, quacks like a filibuster, stinks like a filibuster, could it be a...filibuster? Extraordinary circumstances appeared pretty quickly, didn't they?

The Dems (and their squishy, pathetic Republican collaborators) who are blocking the Bolton nomination don't understand the world we live in, don't understand what's going on at the U.N., don't understand our enemies, don't understand history, don't understand the role of their country in promoting freedom, don't understand U.S. interests, don't understand government's primary function of national defense, and have absolutely no clue about the war we're fighting. All they know is that they are right (because their ideology/religion tells them they're right), that they are smarter than their domestic political opponents (because their opponents tend to be religious and religious people are stupid), and that in this world in 2005 the most evil people on the planet are...American Republicans and especially this Republican president.

It is laughable that the mainstream accepted wisdom about conservatives is that they threaten to impose "theocracy" by "mixing religion and politics." At least religious conservatives know the difference between religion and politics. If they politicize religion, such action is immediately classifiable and debatable. How much more dangerous are the irreligious "liberals" to whom politics is a religion, unacknowledged? The self-righteousness is staggering.

The more wrong they are and the more their horrendous, historical errors are paraded for all the world to see, the more irate and determined they become to ram their worldview down our throats.

Only A Pause

There's been way too much bloviating about McCain & Co.'s "compromise." It's obviously just a punt, and for short yardage at that. Why? Because of this (or something like it). If the "spirit" of the agreement is violated by a judicial filibuster, which is inevitable, the Republicans will turn around and eliminate judicial filibusters, just as they promised. I think when that happens the Dems will look a lot worse than the GOP, for having violated the agreement. I also anticipate this scenario will play out soon.

Slippery Slope

A Democratic congressional moonbat has begun the process of introducing dhimmitude into the U.S. Too bad for Mr. Conyers that any attempt at conflating the text of this resolution with proscribed actions under hate-law legislation would be as unconstitutional as a law against flag-burning (absent a Constitutional amendment). Too bad for us that such moonbats labor on - in their multitude.* To elaborate, the problem is that this resolution is all about condemning expressions of thought - spoken or symbolic. And it singles out Islam as most deserving protection therefrom. The Congress has no business declaring its support for suppression of free speech; at the same time, Conyers is out of line essentially daring the Congress to turn down this resolution amidst the current international milieu, possibly hampering our war effort.


*Yes, Mr. Conyers is not on the list to which I refer, but with actions such as this, he may yet earn his own hallowed perch.

More Crap From The Media

The symmetrical protest meme has won the day - not surprisingly, given the anti-Israel bias in the media. In fact, if you needed proof of that bias, then the way this story flooded all outlets is all you need. To repeat: a Palestinian mob threatened Laura Bush with physical violence - not just by words, but by physical menace that frightened those accompanying the First Lady and required an extraordinary security response (at a Muslin "holy site," no less). Oh, and whaddaya know, there were Jewish protestors along the way on her trip, what a surprise - a perfect excuse for the whitewashing media to blow off the whole incident under the cover of "protests on both sides." Ridiculous.

Palestinian Hospitality

The First Lady receives a gracious welcome from her lovely Palestinian hosts. Notice how this moronic story by one Robert Berger is fashioned to create "balance" by reporting the presence of some peaceful Jewish protestors as if it is morally equivalent to the physical menace of the Palestinians on the occasion of Laura Bush's visit within what they call a holy site.

Another True Liberal Leaves The Left

Keith Thompson walks the walk I walked after 9/11. His occasion, however, was the Iraqi election of 1/30 (hat tip Michelle Malkin).

"Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the 'courage' of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to 'automobile statistics.' The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.

"All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King's call for equal of opportunity.

"These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender 'disparities' are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this: pathetic.

"I smile when friends tell me I've 'moved right.' I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

"In the name of 'diversity,' the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned 'inappropriately directed laughter.' Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment 'may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment.' (Yes, we're talking "subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

"Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school speaking English like 'Why you ain't' and 'Where you is,' Jesse Jackson countered that the time was not yet right to 'level the playing field.' Why not? Because 'drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do that.'

"When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who believe 'I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening,' Susan Estrich spoke up for gender- focused feminists who 'would argue that so long as women are powerless relative to men, viewing "yes" as a sign of true consent is misguided.'

"I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?"