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1486
3DHS / Maybe they could dress Usama like a fetus
« on: October 03, 2006, 12:50:42 AM »

1487
3DHS / Yo Lanya....Brass....Tee....
« on: October 02, 2006, 08:24:40 PM »
Re: GOP Imploding As More and More Details Emerge
« Reply #72 on: Today at 04:58:56 PM »   
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote
Maf54: I miss you lots since san diego.
Teen:   ya I cant wait til dc
Maf54:
Teen:   did you pick a night for dinner
Maf54: not yet…but likely Friday
Teen:   ok…ill plan for Friday then
Maf54: that will be fun


These are Im's , edited at that. The headline is misleading. Why would that be?



Anyone ever going to stand up and demonstrate how the Hell the GOP is "circling the wagons", defending what Foley did?, defending blatantly unaccetable behavior?   ???   Or is it going to me more of the same rhetorical condemnations minus any merit?  In other words, completly non-credible rantings by blinded hard left partisans

1488
3DHS / BOTH Parties sucked, ok?
« on: October 01, 2006, 02:45:40 PM »
Clinton had years and multiple opportunities to take out Usama.  He didn't
Bush had intel, demonstrating how important a target Usama & AlQeada were, and made no headway to prevent 911
This garbage of trying to point fingers at the other guy is useless political posturing & does nothing to improve our task of taking out AlQueada and Militant Islamic Jihadists

Can we agree to that?



1489
3DHS / The real scoreboard
« on: September 30, 2006, 01:42:43 AM »

1490
3DHS / Tickle me Gitmo (toon)
« on: September 30, 2006, 01:41:05 AM »

1491
3DHS / Poll Politics
« on: September 30, 2006, 12:29:54 AM »
On Message
Can the Democrats beat Bush's beliefs with poll politics?


BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, September 29, 2006
 

When pundits confronting the modern sport of extreme politics want to step back from it all, a favored tactic is to ask: What would a man from Mars think? The spectacle currently on display for the man from Mars is a full-throttle election-year fight over the meaning of national security.

- Democrats want voters to view the November election through the fogged and bloody prism of the war in Iraq

- Republicans want voters at 30,000 feet with a war on terror spread to the horizon.

We don't need the proverbial man from Mars to assess the fight between Democrats and Republicans over national security. Over the past year, I've exchanged messages with several American soldiers in Iraq, now a planet in our political system, and I asked one recently for his opinion of the political landscape back home. He sounded like he might prefer Mars.

"We are very cut off from big political debates here," he said. "We have access to email and the Internet, but as a ground combat arms guy, my pace precludes the close following of national political news that I enjoyed prior to deploying, so I can't say that these debates weigh heavily on us." Thank God for that.

It is difficult to imagine that the U.S. soldiers in Iraq would regard the political debate back home as measuring up to the seriousness of what they do every day. How would you like to roll out of your bunk in al Anbar province, Mosul or Baghdad on a Sunday morning and read across the top of the local U.S. paper that everything you've done in Iraq for three years has merely made the terrorism threat worse? You just might lose heart a notch, a dangerous thing when fighting a war.

But at this late stage of the campaign, Iraq-as-failure has become the central narrative in the Democrats' strategy. A memo sent out to Democrats last week by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a strategy group led by former Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg, discusses Mr. Bush's "failure in Iraq, which energized Democrats and dispirited Republicans." It urges Democrats: "On Iraq, stress Bush/GOP 'mismanagement' and need for a 'new direction.' "

There is general agreement in Democratic circles that the party made a mistake by not confronting the national-security issue more forcefully in 2002 and 2004. Paul Begala cited the two elections on the "Today" show Monday and said al Qaeda is "coming back to get us because of the failed policies of George Bush."

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner says it has polled each element of this strategy, and that the poll numbers suggest public support for these Democratic positions. A poll-certified national-security strategy just might work with the out-of-sorts 2006 electorate. But there was a reason for 2002 and 2004. Those Democrats who did get elected channeled their energies into denouncing the Bush antiterror programs and backing the Lamont Insurrection. So there's a problem with the current hand-the-war-to-us strategy: Their hearts and minds really aren't in it. They don't want the war.

No one doubts that George Bush's war on terror is based in belief and principle. Yes indeed, many Democrats say this is precisely the problem. But voters are going to have to make a net judgment between these two variations on a theme. What's before them?

On the GOP side, they've seen George Bush give three major policy speeches this month, pushing the Bush Doctrine with commitment and consistency. Today Congress may send for his signature the bill he sought on terrorist detainees.

The Democrats are back in the national-security game alright, but the playbook is opinion polling first, with belief a second option. One result is their national-security offensive has taken on a surreal unseriousness.

A fortnight ago, the big political story suddenly became ABC's made-for-television movie, "The Path to 9/11." Out of the woods to dominate the news cycle came the ghosts from the Clinton past--Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright--condemning the film as a slander on their long years before the antiterror mast. Up to this point, Democratic candidates had seemed to be surfing smoothly toward control of the House on waves of bad media news out of Iraq. Suddenly they've got to deal with a movie suggesting we're in Iraq because their president failed to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden.

This sideshow culminated last Sunday morning in a bizarre exchange between Bill Clinton and Chris Wallace of Fox--Mr. Clinton wagging a familiar finger at Mr. Wallace and accusing the anchorman of smirking at him. Personally, I think Mr. Wallace generally looks bemused, which is a distant, more innocent cousin of the smirk. Bill O'Reilly, now there's a big-league smirk.

Some pundits surmised that the Clinton eruption was planned to rally the liberal base, depressed at the sight of bad Bush's approval rating crawling back above 40%, and rising. This was Bill Clinton so my guess is it was both--planned and over the top. The fact is, the Democrats found themselves back in Afghanistan with Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, rather than where they wanted the news to be, amid Baghdad's bombs. A messy week.

Then came the leaked NIE story in the New York Times this past Sunday. What a bombshell. This would put them back on message: Iraq as failure. But by now it's evident that the whole workweek invested in the National Intelligence Estimate story was a colossal waste of the time devoted to it. What began Sunday as the Times's towering bonfire--16 intel agencies and 12 anonymous sources writing off Iraq--by Wednesday had burned down to embers.

After the White House released the NIE summary late Tuesday afternoon, reporters reading it for the first time on the Web undoubtedly kept hitting the Page Down button on their PCs. This is it!? Three crummy pages that anyone could have boiled down from a Foreign Affairs "Wither Iraq?" symposium.

The Democrats' problem is this: They are trying to beat policy with politics and weaken belief with polls. This may work for Social Security. I don't think it works with war. Don't be surprised if come November, Democrats are still on message--Iraq as failure--and still in the minority.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110009011


1492
3DHS / Hey Hugo, fire your speech writers
« on: September 28, 2006, 02:38:10 AM »
Did Democrats write Chavez's speech?
Posted: September 28, 2006

Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, used his United Nations address to repeatedly refer to President Bush as a "devil." Immediately, and vigorously, two prominent Democrats defended Bush and lambasted Chavez for maligning "their" president.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called Chavez "an everyday thug." "You don't come into my country, you don't come into my congressional district, and you don't condemn my president," said Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y. Yes, the same Rangel who, after the Supreme Court ruled in Bush's favor in the 2000 presidential election, pronounced the decision an "injustice." With this newfound patriotic fervor, Democrats lashed into Hugo Chavez. Why, how dare he criticize President Bush in a demeaning, brutal fashion!

Here's the question. Where were the neo-defenders of Bush when Democrats repeatedly, and viciously, said virtually the same thing as did Chavez? Let's go to the videotape ...

Hugo Chavez: ""I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday's statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation and pillage of the peoples of the world."

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.: "I sometimes feel as though Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington."

Chavez: "... [T]he American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination. And we cannot allow them to do that. We cannot allow world dictatorship to be consolidated."

Former President Jimmy Carter: "Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world. These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained."

Chavez: "The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war."

Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.: "Week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie. And now, despite the increasingly restless Iraqi population, the administration still refuses to face the truth, or to tell the truth."

Chavez: "The world parent's statement – cynical, hypocritical, full of this imperial hypocrisy from the need they have to control everything."

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.: "Their plan is lie and die. And that's what they're doing. They lie to America about what's happening on the ground, they lie about why we're there, they lie about what's happening."

Chavez: "I have the feeling, dear world dictator, that you are going to live the rest of your days as a nightmare because the rest of us are standing up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations."

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.: "Our troops [in Haditha] ... killed innocent civilians in cold blood." (Murtha said this before there was an investigation. He later apologized.)

Chavez: "How cynical can you get? What a capacity to lie shamefacedly."

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev: Bush is a "loser" and a "liar." [/i] (Reid later apologized for loser, not liar.)

Chavez: "The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads."

Pelosi: "We have a situation where we have two oilmen in the White House, and we have gasoline at over $3 a barrel. Surprise, surprise." She probably meant $3 a gallon. Or maybe she hasn't pumped her own gas lately. Or, how about: "And I'm here to say that when the oilmen, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, strode into town, the showdown began between Big Oil and the consumer. Big Oil won."

Chavez: "Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world."

Michael Moore, the guy the Democrats granted a seat next to former President Jimmy Carter during the Democratic National Convention, called President Bush a "deserter," said "there is no terrorist threat" and denounced the war in Iraq, arguing that America entered into it because of "the oil companies, Israel, Halliburton."

Memo to Chavez, ruler of a country increasingly impoverished due to his policies: Save some money. Fire your speechwriter and just transcribe to Spanish the sound bites from Howard Dean and company.

Sean Penn recently called the president "Beelzebub [Satan] – and a dumb one." How long before the actor, now appearing in the movie flop "All the King's Men," sues Chavez – for plagiarism?


http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52182


1493
3DHS / The Pampered Prima Donna
« on: September 28, 2006, 01:47:13 AM »
Bill Clinton, Pampered Prima Donna
by L. Brent Bozell III
September 26, 2006
   

Pundits are pondering Bill Clinton’s feverish attack on “Fox News Sunday,” laying into Chris Wallace for alleged oh-so-clever smirking and pounding the host’s leg with his pointy finger for emphasis.

No one asked if Clinton’s outburst hurt the publicity for his “Clinton Global Initiative.” (It didn’t help.) The first question was: staged outrage, or a spontaneous reaction? It’s quite a commentary on the Slick One that millions on both sides of the political fence would guess he plotted this tantrum in advance. Count me in on that number. I believe it was staged, a plan to please left-wingers who loathe Fox News with a passion and want them demonized as the communications center of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

Clinton’s hot-tempered answer simply does not match the question from Chris Wallace. The central question was tough, but restrained, based on a book written by Lawrence Wright, a writer for The New Yorker, not a conservative magazine, to put it mildly. It was not unlike the typical question Tim Russert would ask his guest. But Wallace may have tripped a trigger by mentioning Clinton’s 1993 debacle in Somalia, primarily because it’s something every other interviewer skips. The roughest part came when Wallace quoted Osama bin Laden from that Wright book. In the wake of the Somalia debacle, bin Laden reportedly stated "I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of U.S. troops."

What came flying out of Clinton’s mouth sounded like vintage Hillary. Fox is asking me this because “ABC just had a right-wing conservative” show on 9/11! “President Bush’s neo-cons” thought I was too obsessed with bin Laden, and they did nothing before 9/11! At least I tried to get Osama, unlike “the right-wingers who are attacking me now!”

But Clinton sounded stranger when he attacked Wallace personally:[i] “So you did Fox’s bidding on this show. You did your nice little conservative hit job on me.”[/i] And then it grew even more bizarre: “You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch’s supporting my work on climate change.” If Murdoch has grown more supportive of the Clintons, then why would he conspire to ruin Clinton’s Fox appearance?

Wallace was certainly surprised – stunned would better describe it – by Clinton’s intensity. When asked to explain it later, Wallace said he read the transcripts of Clinton’s other media appearances, including CNN’s “Larry King Live,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and FNC’s own “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” He was “astonished” that none of these bothered to raise the question of Clinton’s presidential performance on terrorism, even in the wake of all the furor Team Clinton raised trying to kill off ABC’s docudrama “Path to 9/11.” That list doesn’t include Clinton shoe-shiners like Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” or MSNBC’s resident Chihuahua, Keith Olbermann.

You can’t really be astonished by Larry King, whose usual tough question would be along the lines of “Jif or Skippy, Mr. President?” I exaggerate, but not by much. Here’s an actual Larry King question to Clinton from last week: “Now, the purpose of your initiative overall is to make the world a better place, right?...Is it a better place?” You can’t be that astonished by Greta van Susteren, who’s the designated puffball interviewer of both Clintons for FNC. (And that’s another nail in the coffin of that alleged Murdoch conspiracy.)

The real disappointment on this list is Russert, the man who built a reputation for grilling politicians with long text boxes of challenging information. But for Clinton, Russert delivered a Larry King performance. His actual first questions: “The second year of the Clinton Global Initiative. What did you achieve this year?...Do people keep their commitments?” Then he went on to other toughies. Is Dick Cheney wrong on Iraq? And when Hillary runs, are you ready for the nasty attacks on her?

The second annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative was more proof that Clinton walks around with the major media in his jacket pocket. Look no further than the long list of so-called “featured attendees” who associated themselves with the event. Many of them were moderators of panel discussions – not only predictable names like George Stephanopoulos, but Tom Brokaw, Judy Woodruff, Newsweek international editor Fareed Zakaria, CNN anchors Zain Verjee and Sanjay Gupta, and NPR anchor Michele Norris. Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, and Christiane Amanpour were also on the list of supportive media attendees.

It’s easy to see from this display that Clinton is a pampered peacock, a prima donna who expects the media elite to love him, and explodes like a spoiled child when anyone dares challenge him. He only expects a challenge from the radical right-wingers at Fox. That’s what he calls anyone who would ruffle a fine feather of his glorious legacy-building project.


http://www.mrc.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2006/col20060926.asp



1494
3DHS / Great example of someone with severe BDS
« on: September 27, 2006, 11:50:31 AM »
Olbermann Demeans Wallace as 'Monkey,'
Bush Not 'True American'


     Keith Olbermann ended Monday's Countdown with his latest "Special Comment" rant, complete with video from a man on a rack in the movie 1984 as Olbermann described President's Bush's supposedly awful deeds. In praising how, in his interview aired on Fox News Sunday, "Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration," Olbermann portrayed Chris Wallace, who conducted the interview, as an agent of the White House and delivered the lowest of insults, calling Wallace "a monkey posing as a newscaster." 

     On Bush, Olbermann accused him of "cowardice" and argued: "After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts -- that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon." Olbermann concluded his 10-minute plus diatribe: "Mr. Bush: Are yours the actions of a true American?"

     The MRC's Brad Wilmouth appended the following to my initial post:

     Olbermann opened the segment contending that Clinton had been "sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster," and charged that the Bush administration's "assault" on freedoms "can do as much damage as al-Qaeda." Olbermann preemptively rationalized his "crazed" rant by arguing that "our tone should be crazed." He also compared Fox News to the "propaganda" of Tokyo Rose:
     "The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back. It is not important that the current President's portable public chorus has described his predecessor's tone as 'crazed.' Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al-Qaeda. The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit."

     Notably, about half an hour earlier on Olbermann's show, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, a liberal journalist who was appearing as a guest, had actually defended Wallace's decision to question Clinton about how he handled bin Laden. Alter: "I don't think there was any pre-ground rules breaking or anything like that, and I don't actually fault Chris Wallace at all. Look, when go into an interview like this, you want to ask good provocative questions. That's what we're paid to do....I don't think [Clinton] was right that somehow, you know, Fox was out to get him on this. As Wallace said, he was posing a question that a lot of Fox's admittedly very conservative viewers wanted to know."

     And just a few minutes after Olbermann's show concluded, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, liberal political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell similarly defended Wallace's interview as "perfectly sensible." O'Donnell: "Chris Wallace, by the way, I don't think did do a right-wing hit job. I think the interview was a perfectly sensible interview."

     Returning to Olbermann's Countdown show, the MSNBC host praised Clinton's supposedly "courageous" truth-telling: "Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years."

     After implying that President Bush is not a "grown-up," Olbermann went on to accuse Bush of attempting, without "conscience" or "shame," to "re-write history," as he labeled Bush's administration the "worst presidency since James Buchanan."

     Olbermann: "But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now. Except for this: After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts, that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him by proxy."

     Ever the conspiracy theorist with a substantial history of accusing the Bush administration of politically timing terror alerts to distract from embarrassing news, Olbermann moved on to make a similar charge of timing, as he compared the Bush Administration to "authoritarians" being helped by "hyenas" at Fox News, and contended that Clinton was "brave" to take the Bush Administration to task for "criminal negligence." 

     Olbermann: "Consider the timing: the very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is, not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it. The kind of proof of incompetence for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion in a scapegoat. It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired but a propagandist promoted: Promise to talk of charity and generosity, but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless. And don't even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself, blame your audience for e-mailing you the question. Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen. He told the great truth untold about this administration's negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden. Mr. Clinton was brave."

     Olbermann, who has fallaciously complained that the Bush administration has accused critics like him of not being patriotic, concluded his "Special Comment" accusing President Bush of not being a "true American."

     Olbermann: "The free pass has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush. You did not act to prevent 9/11. We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11. You have failed us, then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11. You have failed us anew in Afghanistan. And you have now tried to hide your failures by blaming your predecessor. And now you exploit your failure to rationalize brazen torture which doesn't work anyway, which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding, which only humiliates our country further in the world, and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate. And there it is, sir: Are yours the actions of a true American? I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck."

     Below is a complete transcript of Olbermann's "Special Comment" from the September 25 Countdown show:

     "Finally tonight, a 'Special Comment' about President Clinton's interview. The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back. It is not important that the current President's portable public chorus has described his predecessor's tone as 'crazed.' Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al-Qaeda. The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit.
     "Nonetheless, the headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11 and the current presidential administration. 'At least I tried,' he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. 'That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.' Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.
     "The Bush administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The Bush administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors. The Bush administration did not understand the daily briefing entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.' The Bush administration did not try. Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest pass for incompetence and malfeasance in American history.
     "President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs, some of them 17 years old, before Pearl Harbor. President Hoover was correctly blamed for, if not the Great Depression itself, then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash. Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War, though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.
     "But not this President. To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11, 2001, or the nearly eight months that preceded it. That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the executive. But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.
     "Except for this: After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts, that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.
     "Consider the timing: the very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is, not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it. The kind of proof of incompetence for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion in a scapegoat. It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired but a propagandist promoted: Promise to talk of charity and generosity, but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless. And don't even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself, blame your audience for e-mailing you the question.
     "Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen. He told the great truth untold about this administration's negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden. Mr. Clinton was brave. Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist, and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.
     "The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon. Disney was the first to sell out its corporate reputation, with The Path to 9/11. Of that company's crimes against truth, one needs to say little. Simply put, someone there enabled an authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush's new and improved history. The basic plot line was this: Because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.
     "The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of that slapdash theory is that the right-wingers who have advocated it, who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews, have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw. Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20 of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so? That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie Wag the Dog. Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton's judgement. Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri, the future Attorney General, echoed Coats. Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.
     "And, of course, were it true Clinton had been distracted by the Lewinsky witch hunt, who on Earth conducted the Lewinsky witch hunt? Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years? Who corrupted the political media? Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air the counterterrorism analysts, like Dr. Richard Haass and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of the cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us here? Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was 'All Monica All The Time'? Who distracted whom?
     "This is, of course, where, as is inevitable, Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are. The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four. But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it's all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you. The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton, but by the same people who got you elected President.
     "Thus, instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it, we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly. Thus, instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us safe ever since, a statement that might range anywhere from zero to 100 percent true. We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything. And, of course, the one time you ever have given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush, you got the name of the supposedly targeted tower in Los Angeles wrong.
     "Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt, what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack: You did not try. You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor. You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people. Then, you blamed your predecessor. That would be a textbook definition, sir, of cowardice.
     "To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past. That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair, writing as George Orwell, gave us in the novel 1984. The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.
     "'The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.' 'Power is not a means; it is an end.' 'One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. 'The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.'
     "Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln's State of the Union address from 1862: 'We must disenthrall ourselves.' Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln's sentence. He might well have. 'We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.' And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date, to save our country.
     "The free pass has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush. You did not act to prevent 9/11. We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11. You have failed us, then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11. You have failed us anew in Afghanistan. And you have now tried to hide your failures by blaming your predecessor. And now you exploit your failure to rationalize brazen torture which doesn't work anyway, which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding, which only humiliates our country further in the world, and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate. And there it is, sir: Are yours the actions of a true American? I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck."


http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/2006/cyb20060926.asp#1

1495
3DHS / What Clinton Didn't Do . . .
« on: September 27, 2006, 01:38:13 AM »
. . . .and when he didn't do it.

BY RICHARD MINITER
Wednesday, September 27, 2006


Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats--the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war--is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap--air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects--there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton's policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush's.

It is vital that this debate be honest, but so far this has not been the case. Both Mr. Clinton's outrage at Chris Wallace's questioning and the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11" are attempts to polarize the nation's memory. While this divisiveness may be good for Mr. Clinton's reputation, it is ultimately unhealthy for the country. What we need, instead, is a cold-eyed look at what works against terrorists and what does not. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations ought to be put to the same iron test.

With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror.

Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.

In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.

By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.

• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.

• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.

• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.

• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.

• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.

Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.

• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.

• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.

When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009001


1496
3DHS / Shaping the Topic: the NIE memo
« on: September 26, 2006, 02:34:39 AM »
Putting aside for the moment the likely illegal leaking of this latest classified information, here's the WSJ's suggestion in dealing with it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Declassify the Terrorism NIE
How to defeat selective politically motivated leaks.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006


As media scoops go, those based on "classified" information seem to have a special cachet. But judging from the latest, selective intelligence leak about terrorism, we wonder if anyone would bother to read this stuff if it didn't have the word "secret" slapped on it.

That's our reaction to Sunday's New York Times report claiming that a 2006 national intelligence estimate, or NIE, concludes that "the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse," according to one of the unidentified "intelligence officials" cited in the article. This is supposedly because the war has provoked radical Islamists to hate America even more than they already did before they hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings. If this is the kind of insight we pay our spooks to generate, we're in more trouble than we thought.

It's impossible to know how true this report is, of course, since the NIE itself hasn't been leaked. The reports are based on what sources claim the NIE says, but we don't know who those sources are and what motivations they might have. Since their spin coincides rather conveniently with the argument made by Democratic critics of the war, and since this leak has also conveniently sprung in high campaign season, wise readers will be skeptical.

The White House responded yesterday by saying the full NIE on "Trends in Global Terrorism" is far more nuanced and complex than the press reports claim. Spokesman Tony Snow added that one "thing the reports do not say is that war in Iraq has made terrorism worse." So here's our suggestion for President Bush: Declassify the entire NIE.

It's not as if NIEs usually contain sensitive raw intelligence. They're more like Council on Foreign Relations reports, full of consensus analysis and glorified by the mere fact of being "secret." To the extent that any passages might compromise sources and methods, those parts could be redacted or summarized. Meanwhile, disclosure would give the American public a valuable window into the thinking that goes on at places like the CIA. Since some of our spooks are leaking selectively to make the President look bad, Mr. Bush should return the favor by letting the public inspect the quality of analysis that their tax dollars are buying.
Releasing the NIE would also show that the White House has learned something since 2003, which is when the last pre-election bout of selective intelligence leaks began. That leak du jour claimed that an October 2002 NIE had contradicted Mr. Bush's claims in his [RANDO]State of the Union address about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa. We happened to gain access to the complete NIE, however, and reported on July 17, 2003, that the leaked accounts were incomplete and misleading. The Senate Intelligence Committee vindicated our account a year later, but the Bush Administration could have reduced the political damage by declassifying that 2002 NIE immediately.

As for the substance of the 2006 NIE's alleged claims, does anyone doubt that many jihadis are rallying against the American presence in Iraq? The newspapers tell us that much every day. Whether the war in Iraq has produced more terrorist hatred than would otherwise exist, however, is a matter of opinion and strategic judgment.

We recall, for example, that one of Osama bin Laden's justifications for declaring war against the U.S. was American enforcement of sanctions and a no-fly zone against Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Bin Laden didn't need the war to hate us. More broadly, the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan has deprived the jihadis of two safe havens and sources of funds. So while there are still many al Qaeda-type terror cells out there, there's no reason to believe they are any more dangerous now than before April 2003. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the terrorists who was harbored in Iraq before the war, certainly isn't any more dangerous; he's dead.
The real issue at stake here is a political and policy fight over the future of Iraq.

The Democrats claim that Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror and so a rapid U.S. withdrawal would leave the U.S. with more resources to fight elsewhere.

Mr. Bush says Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror, and that withdrawing would create a vacuum that the Islamists would fill and give them a potential new state-supported base of operations.

That's the choice voters really ought to be thinking about as they go to the polls in November, and if the NIE has something useful to say about that debate, Mr. Bush should disarm the selective leakers in his bureaucracy by making it public.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008998

1497
3DHS / How did some adherents to the 'religion of peace' react?
« on: September 25, 2006, 09:18:38 PM »
Death threats from the 'religion of peace'
Posted: September 21, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI, during a speech in Germany, at a university where he used to teach, quoted a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor: "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.' ... Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God,' the emperor says, 'is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.'" And, the pontiff even condemned violent jihad, or "holy war."

Note that the pope, in a very lengthy speech critical of the growing secularization of the West, devoted only three paragraphs to the subject of jihad. Moreover, the pope repeatedly said that those words were not his own. And later, the Vatican said the pope intended only to spark dialogue and that the emperor's words in no way reflected the thoughts of the pope himself.

How did some adherents to the religion of peace react?

Angry riots, death threats, burning of the pope in effigy and demands for an apology.

Somali Muslims shot an Italian nun who worked in a Somali hospital. They shot her four times in the back as she left the hospital, and as she lay dying on the ground, she muttered in Italian to her killers, "I forgive, I forgive."

Firebombs were hurled at seven churches during one weekend in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One group demanded a televised apology, or they would blow up all of Gaza's churches.

As usual, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a "moderate" pro-Arab organization, condemned the pope's words, but not the violent reaction to them.

The deputy leader of the Turkish prime minister's party said, "He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini."

Al-Qaida in Iraq issued this death threat: "You infidels and despots, we will continue our jihad and never stop until God avails us to chop your necks and raise the fluttering banner of monotheism when God's rule is established governing all people and nations. ... [The cross-worshipper pope] and the West are doomed. ... We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the jizya [non-Muslim] tax; then the only thing acceptable is a conversion [to Islam] or [being killed by] the sword."

Following this violent reaction, the pope, at his weekly Angelus blessing this past Sunday, used the word "sorry." Sorry, that is, for the violent reaction to his words. Still, the pope refused to retract his statements. And why should he? After all, the violent reaction proved his point in ways the pope's words never could.

Now, what about stateside? Editorials in two major American newspapers criticized – the pope! In an editorial chastising the pope for alleged insensitivity, the Los Angeles Times said, "The pope shouldn't be quoting people who call [Islam] 'evil.'" The editorial concluded, " ... [P]opes need to watch their words when they have political consequences."

Calling the pope a "doctrinal conservative," the New York Times said, " ... [H]is greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue. The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly."

So this is where we are. The people behind the publication of the "offensive" Danish cartoons fear being seen in public, lest they suffer the fate of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh, a descendant of the painter Vincent van Gogh, made a film that criticized Islam's treatment of women. Authorities found him shot and stabbed to death, and a five-page manifesto declaring holy war pinned to his chest with the same knife used to stab him.

An Iranian newspaper recently sponsored a "contest" asking for submissions of anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying cartoons. One showed the Statue of Liberty holding a book on the Holocaust in one hand and giving a Nazi-style salute with the other. The reaction? No Jews rioted, no Jews committed kidnappings, no Jews engaged in beheadings. Meanwhile, the website TheReligionofPeace.com records deadly terror attacks committed by Islamo-facists since 9/11/2001. The tally, as of this writing, stands at 5,870.

So there you have it. The West, says the pope, pursues reason without faith – and Westerners failed to riot. But when the pope accuses Islam of pursuing faith without reason – Islamo-fascists demand an apology ... or else.


http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52078




1498
3DHS / Dealing with some of those terms: Islamofascism
« on: September 25, 2006, 03:39:03 PM »
As much as it might pain Js and others as to how inaccurate such a term is supposed to be, I'm going to keep calling a duck a duck, in this case.  And this op-ed helps that POV along

Islamic Fascism 101
On all they’ve done to earn the name.
By Victor Davis Hanson


Make no apologies for the use of “Islamic fascism.” It is the perfect nomenclature for the agenda of radical Islam, for a variety of historical and scholarly reasons. That such usage also causes extreme embarrassment to both the Islamists themselves and their leftist “anti-fascist” appeasers in the West is just too bad.
 
First, the general idea of “fascism” — the creation of a centralized authoritarian state to enforce blanket obedience to a reactionary, all-encompassing ideology — fits well the aims of contemporary Islamism that openly demands implementation of sharia law and the return to a Pan-Islamic and theocratic caliphate.

In addition, Islamists, as is true of all fascists, privilege their own particular creed of true believers by harkening back to a lost, pristine past, in which the devout were once uncorrupted by modernism.

True, bin Laden’s mythical Volk doesn’t bath in the clear icy waters of the Rhine untouched by the filth of the Tiber; but rather they ride horses and slice the wind with their scimitars in service of a soon to be reborn majestic world of caliphs and mullahs. Osama bin Laden sashaying in his flowing robes is not all that different from the obese Herman Goering in reindeer horns plodding around his Karinhall castle with suspenders and alpine shorts.

Because fascism is born out of insecurity and the sense of failure, hatred for Jews is de rigueur. To read al Qaeda’s texts is to reenter the world of Mein Kampf (naturally now known as jihadi in the Arab world). The crackpot minister of its ideology, Dr. Zawahiri, is simply a Dr. Alfred Rosenberg come alive — a similar quarter-educated buffoon, who has just enough of a vocabulary to dress up fascist venom in a potpourri of historical misreadings and pseudo-learning.

Envy and false grievance, as in the past with Italian, German, or Japanese whining, are always imprinted deeply within the fascist mind. After all, it can never quite figure out why the morally pure, the politically zealous, the ever more obedient are losing out to corrupt and decadent democracies — where “mixing,” either in the racial or religious sense, should instead have enervated the people.

The “will” of the German people, like the “Banzai” spirit of the Japanese, should always trump the cowardly and debased material superiority of decadent Western democracies. So al Qaeda boasts that in Somalia and Afghanistan the unshakeable creed of Islam overcame the richer and better equipped Americans and Russians. To read bin Laden’s communiqués is to be reminded of old Admiral Yamamato assuring his creepy peers that his years in the United States in the 1920s taught him that Roaring Twenties America, despite its fancy cars and skyscrapers, simply could not match the courage of the chosen Japanese.

Second, fascism thrives best in a once proud, recently humbled, but now ascendant, people. They are ripe to be deluded into thinking contemporary setbacks were caused by others and are soon to be erased through ever more zealotry. What Versailles and reparations were to Hitler’s new Germany, what Western colonialism and patronizing in the Pacific were to the rising sun of the Japanese, what the embarrassing image of the perennial sick man of Europe was to Mussolini’s new Rome, so too Israel, modernism, and America’s ubiquitous pop culture are to the Islamists, confident of a renaissance via vast petro-weatlh.

Such reactionary fascism is complex because it marries the present’s unhappiness with moping about a regal past — with glimpses of an even more regal future. Fascism is not quite the narcotic of the hopeless, but rather the opiate of the recently failed now on the supposed rebound who welcome the cheap fix of blaming others and bragging about their own iron will.

Third, while there is generic fascism, its variants naturally weave preexisting threads familiar to a culture at large. Hitler’s brand cribbed together notions of German will, Aryanism, and the cult of the Ubermensch from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, with ample Nordic folk romance found from Wagner to Tacitus’s Germania. Japanese militarism’s racist creed, fanaticism, and sense of historical destiny were a motley synthesis of Bushido, Zen and Shinto Buddhism, emperor worship, and past samurai legends. Mussolini’s fasces, and the idea of an indomitable Caesarian Duce (or Roman Dux), were a pathetic attempt to resurrect imperial Rome. So too Islamic fascism draws on the Koran, the career of Saladin, and the tracts of Nasserites, Baathists, and Muslim Brotherhood pamphleteers.

Fourth, just as it was idle in the middle of World War II to speculate how many Germans, Japanese, or Italians really accepted the silly hatred of Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo, so too it is a vain enterprise to worry over how many Muslims follow or support al Qaeda, or, in contrast,  how many in the Middle East actively resist Islamists.

Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda’s success or failure. Just as there weren’t more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the Wehrmacht finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn’t a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble.

It doesn’t matter whether Middle Easterners actually accept the tenets of bin Laden’s worldview — not if they think he is on the ascendancy, can bring them a sense of restored pride, and humiliate the Jews and the West on the cheap. Bin Laden is no more eccentric or impotent than Hitler was in the late 1920s.Yet if he can claim that his martyrs forced the United States out of Afghanistan and Iraq, toppled a petrol sheikdom or two, and acquired its wealth and influence — or if he got his hands on nuclear weapons and lorded it over appeasing Westerners — then he too, like the Fuhrer in the 1930s, will become untouchable. The same is true of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad.

Fifth, fascism springs from untruth and embraces lying. Hitler had contempt for those who believed him after Czechoslovakia. He broke every agreement from Munich to the Soviet non-aggression pact. So did the Japanese, who were sending their fleet to Pearl Harbor even as they talked of a new diplomatic breakthrough.

Al-Zawahiri in his writings spends an inordinate amount of effort excusing al Qaeda’s lies by referring to the Koranic notions of tactical dissimulation. We remember Arafat saying one thing in English and another in Arabic, and bin Laden denying responsibility for September 11 and then later boasting of it. Nothing a fascist says can be trusted, since all means are relegated to the ends of seeing their ideology reified. So too Islamic fascists, by any means necessary, will fib, and hedge for the cause of Islamism. Keep that in mind when considering Iran’s protestations about its “peaceful” nuclear aims.

We can argue whether the present-day Islamic fascists have the military means comparable to what was had in the past by Nazis, Fascists, and militarists — I think a dirty bomb is worth the entire Luftwaffe, one nuclear missile all the striking power of the Japanese imperial Navy — but there should be no argument over who they are and what they want. They are fascists of an Islamic sort, pure and simple.
 
And the least we can do is to call them that: after all, they earned it.
 

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGEyNjcyNzBjYTQ2MDM0ZGIzZjY5YjhhMzViYjdjNTA=

1499
3DHS / I wish some of you would get your terms right
« on: September 24, 2006, 05:09:28 PM »
Or more accurately, apply them when appropriate.  It's bad enough dealing with Tee's misguided hyperbolic rants of how out of control our military is, or Lanya's op-ed parade of how Bush is a war criminal, so why not actually try applying terms appropriately.

Let's start with "Torture".  There's a continued tactic of those with BDS who claim that we "torture", that the Bush administration condones "torture", that those who support our war on Terror and efforts at interrogating captured prisoners advocate "torture".  All despite the continued on-the-record proclaimations that we don't.  It sure does appear the left distorts the term "torture", in an effort to apply it to anything that may be considered "uncomfortable".  In reality however "uncomfortable" does NOT equal "torture".

I do believe that folks like Bush or those who support the war have been very up front in NOT condoning torture.  And I do beleive that term is appropriately applied to the physical personifications of torture such as the tearing of nails, breaking of bones, piercing body parts, joint dislocations, basically the stuff done to John McCain when he was a POW at the hands of the Vietcong

Sadly, it does appear that the left, in their fervor to condemn anything & everything Bush, applies "torture" to mean anything that might remotely bring discomfort or psychologocal duress to an enemy combantant.  And heaven forbid if they don't get "legal representation".  This is a war, not some criminal investigation.  The enemy has made it clear what their intentions are.  Now, you don't have to believe that, you don't have to believe Bush, you don't have to believe me.  What would be a breath of fresh air however, would be in you folks honestly applying terms, where they're appropriate.  Which includes refraining from knee jerk accusations that anyone that doesn't agree with your POV must be a supporter of "torture"

Can you folks do that?


Now, shall we move on to "tax cuts for the rich" & "states rights"?

1500
3DHS / My Carnac moment
« on: September 23, 2006, 05:20:36 PM »
(for those who are fond Johnny Carson fans, you'll know who Carnac was).  Pretending for a moment that the Usama news is accurate, regarding his physical demise, I can pretty much predict what the response from the left will be.  Very little about Usama, and everyting about Bush.  I'd imagine rhetoric along the lines of "Bush spent how many billions on the war, and he couldn't kill Usama"..."A microscopic bacteria did what Bush and his enormous oppressive military couldn't"..."If Bush had put more resources into getting Usama, he would have been killed so much sooner.", stuff like that.  You 'll hear presious little about how great it is that Usama is dead & what it means in the war on Islamofascist terrorism (or radical militant Islam for the PC sensitive of the group), only how bad Bush was & continues to be

Let's sit back, watch, & wait, and see if I'm proved right

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