Various And Sundry

Some links for the day:

The Karl Rove quote (don't see anyting wrong with it - guess the truth hurts).

Comments on the Kelo decision (I thought this court was supposed to be conservative?).

VDH with some fine nuggets.

"When Western liberals today talk of a mythical period in the days after 9/11 of 'unity' and 'European solidarity' what they really remember is a Golden Age of Victimhood, or about four weeks before the strikes against the Taliban commenced. Then for a precious moment at last the United States was a real victim, apparently weak and vulnerable, and suffering cosmic justice from a suddenly empowered other. Oh, to return to the days before Iraq and Afghanistan, when we were hurt, introspective, and pitied, and had not yet lashed out.' "

Steyn still has his eye on international, and especially UN, ineffectualness in helping tsunami victims.

At Bill Bennett's site, the responses of General Abizaid and Don Rumsfeld to Ted Kennedy's outrageous, false, vindictive, out-of-line, morale-sapping, enemy-serving (sorry - it's true) confrontational accusations in the Senate yesterday.

And here is a short and sweet entry by David Horowitz describing his idea (and mine, BTW) of legitimate (a word which does not mean "legal," a much broader concept) criticism and dissent in this time of war. In full:

"A Patriot will begin by regcognizing that is we who have been attacked by the Islamic jihad not the other way around. A patriot will begin by recognizing what a great and humane country this is, that we're in a war with an enemy who has shown no human decency towards those they have attacked, who will use any means to destroy all of us, every man woman and child because we do not share his religion. A patriot will begin by understanding that war is hell; that as a nation we behave better in war than any other country with the possible exception of Israel; that atrocities are endemic to wars and unlike Arab and Muslim states we don't celebrate our atrocities but condemn them; that we prosecute those who commit crimes on our side; that we are probably treating our prisoners in Guanatanamo better than they deserve and who, having joined a terrorist force to kill all infidels combatants and non-combatants, women and children alike actually deserve nothing; a Patriot will probably understand that if we weren't fighting these bastards in Iraq we would probably be fighting them in Washington and New York, and that is why we must win and to win we must destroy them. Above all a patriot will modify and shape, and set the tone of his criticisms out of respect for our men and women in harms way and for the men and women whose responsibility they are, out of concern for our safety here at home; a patriot will want to take care not to give ammunition to our enemies or to demoralize our brave young men and women on the front or declare a behind the lines war on their leaders, as Dick Durbin and Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy and Al Gore and Jimmy Carter and John Kerry and the New York Times and 60 Minutes or leftists like Michael Moore and Mark Danner and Michael Ratner have already and unconscionably done. A patriot will make clear that the enemy is the enemy, and not us. Then he or she can make whatever criticism they may, suitably framed by these understandings and loyalties, suitably framed by their commitment to a military victory for our side in this war."

See ya' after the fourth, y'all.

Advocating Blindness

Michelle Malkin fingers another attempt at propaganda aimed at neutralizing the war effort at home. So if you plan to see it on the FX channel, make sure you read this first.

"I asked the show's executive producers--all of whom worked on 'The Awful Truth With Michael Moore,' a cable TV show--how this could be a documentary when they had decided the outcome in advance. Wasn't it possible that Mr. Stacy would come out seeing that there isn't Islamophobia to the extent that the Muslim community claims? Might he see that there is disturbingly strong support in the Detroit-area Islamic community for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah--a fact regularly documented even in the normally pliant Detroit media?

"No, the producers told me. 'Morgan wants the show to demonstrate to America that we are Islamophobic and that 9/11's biggest victims are Muslims.' With this in mind, I agreed to be filmed only with final approval of my appearance, which I never gave. Thus I will not appear in Wednesday's show."

Krauthammer

CK's focus today is on CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement. His point is well taken; as usual the Dems betray their own professed principles, and reverse their recently professed principles out of partisan hatred.

"What has happened to the Democrats over the past few decades is best captured by the phrase (coined by Kevin Phillips) 'reactionary liberalism.' Spent of new ideas, they have but one remaining idea: to hang on to the status quo at all costs.

"This is true across the board. On Social Security, which is facing an impending demographic and fiscal crisis, they have put absolutely nothing on the table. On presidential appointments -- first, judges and now ambassador to the United Nations -- they resort to the classic weapon of southern obstructionism: the filibuster. And on foreign policy, they have nothing to say on the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq or the burgeoning Arab Spring (except the refrain: 'Guantanamo')."

What Apology?

"If anything I said..."

"Some may believe..."

Dicky Durbin issues his (let's be generous) 3/4 apology to America and the troops. He remains the minority whip.

A Third Time For Bolton?

They're going to try again to end cloture on Bolton. It is impossible for me to understand the Dem obstruction here as anything other than the attempt of a legislative minority to appropriate the foreign policy perogative of a an executive branch that they happen to hate with a passion (but to whom they also happen to have lost an election). I still say this is a good enough reason for Frist to blast away the filibuster of Presidential nominations once and for all. The moral and legal case is stronger for executive branch appointments than it is for judical ones, in my opinion.

Negotiation, "Palestinian" Style

You never know with Debkafile, which is the main source for this Jihad Watch post, but it is interesting to think about how many or much of these completely ludicrous "Palestinian" demands and postures might be responsible for the breakdown of Israeli-"Palestinian" talks. The tenor is certainly consistent with the history of Arab "negotiation."

Screw 'em. Build the barrier, maintain however much of a military presence is necessary for Israeli security, and let them devour themselves (which they seem well on the way to doing).

More Truth About Gitmo

Here is a very good article by Michelle Malkin (so what else is new?) on the actual legal situation of detainees at Gitmo.

"Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one. As a result of those hearings, more than three dozen Gitmo detainees have been released. The hearings, called 'Combatant Status Review Tribunals,' are held before a board of officers, and permit the detainees to contest the facts on which their classification as 'enemy combatants' is based.

"Gitmo-bashers attack the Bush administration's failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions. But as legal analysts Lee Casey and Darin Bartram told me, 'the status hearings are, in fact, fully comparable to the "Article V" hearings required by the Geneva Conventions, in situations where those treaties apply, and are also fully consistent with the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case.'

"Treating foreign terrorists like American shoplifters -- with full access to civilian lawyers, classified intelligence, and all the attendant rights of a normal jury trial -- is a surefire recipe for another 9/11. That is why the Bush administration fought so hard to erect an alternative tribunal system -- long established in wartime -- in the first place."

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.