Category — War on Terror

Let me see if I have all of this straight.  Barack Obama, who didn’t support the surge in Iraq and won’t recognize the positive results, supports a surge for Afghanistan.  Pray tell, Messiah, what makes the Afghan surge more likely to yield results than the Iraq one you never supported?

And if that didn’t make your head hurt, Obama promises to end the war in Iraq and will celebrate by starting one in Pakistan:

“Al-Qaida has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia.

“We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as president I won’t,” he said.

“We must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like (Osama) bin Laden if we have them in our sights.”

So Barrack Obama is going to “restore” our standing in the international community by violating the sovereignty of a nuclear armed Pakistan.  I guess you have to believe in his messianic powers to make sense of these plans.

If this is the best he can do with a prepared speech and teleprompter, no wonder he won’t face McCain in town hall meetings.  The debates should be very entertaining when this empty suit won’t have his campaign staffers whispering in his ear.

It’s also interesting to note all these policies were developed prior to his trip overseas where he was suppose to gain some gravitas on international issues.  Of course that dog and pony show is akin to visiting Niagara Falls and claiming you’re now qualified to be ambassador to Canada.

So John McCain is the new face of the Republican Party. If true, count me out. I just spent 8 years watching President Bush sabotage the conservative movement on almost every major domestic policy issue. I’m not going to shot myself in the foot over and over again just to get a Republican elected.

It’s time for conservatives to reexamine their relationship with the Republican Party. The old platitudes about any Republican being better than a Democrat just aren’t true. I didn’t derive much consolation from the fact that George Bush was a Republican when he was partnering with Teddy Kennedy on illegal immigration and education.

It’s also well past time to look at the bigger picture and not blindly accept the notion that nothing matters besides the War on Terrorism. Conservatives need to resist the temptation to become single issue voters. That’s not to say that you’ll agree with everything a particular candidate does, but you do have to look at a much broader canvas.

And that’s why the Republican Party and John McCain have lost me. When you look at the broader core of what John McCain and the Party under a McCain presidency would represent (global warming, illegal immigration, socialized medicine, higher taxes, expansion of government scope and size, etc.), there’s very little reason to support it or him. The ever so prized independents and liberals are welcome to it.

Via JustOneMinute:

Let me see if I understand this - John Edwards and the Krugman Democrats want to negotiate with the Iranians and North Koreans but not the drug companies or health insurers.

Well, as long as we are clear who the bad guys are.

Speaking of Iran, it looks like they almost got more than they bargained for when provoking US Navy warships this weekend (HT: Gateway Pundit):

In what U.S. officials called a serious provocation, Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to explode the American vessels.

U.S. forces were on the verge of firing on the Iranian boats in the early Sunday incident, when the boats turned and moved away, a Pentagon official said. “It is the most serious provocation of this sort that we’ve seen yet,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: “We urge the Iranians to refrain from such provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident in the future.”

…There were no injuries but the official said there could have been, because the Iranian boats turned away “literally at the very moment that U.S. forces were preparing to open fire” in self defense.

The official said he didn’t have the precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces, but said the Iranians radioed something like “we’re coming at you and you’ll explode in a couple minutes.”

We should have given them an express ticket to meet Allah.

Dubya: “Family values don’t stop at the border”. Maybe not, but when you don’t know who’s coming here, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS!

Los Angeles - In a murderous quest aimed at cleansing their turf of snitches and rival gangsters, member of one of Los Angeles’ County’s most vicious Latino gangs sometimes killed people just because of their race, an investigation found.

I’m shocked. Gangs connected to the Mexican Mafia aren’t motivated by simple avarice and a desire for a better life? You mean they’re bad people, racists, in the only way a lefty can understand “bad”?

Then there’s THIS BUNCH…Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13.

In the United States the gang’s strongholds have been in Washington, DC, Miami and Souther California and Northern Virginia…

Illegal immigration and human smuggling

According to The Washington Times, MS-13 is “thought to have established a major smuggling center” in Mexico. There were reports that MS-13 members were ordered to Arizona to target border guards and Minuteman Project volunteers…

But don’t worry, because….

FBI agent Robert Clifford said that the US intelligence community and governments of several Central American countries found there is no basis to believe that MS-13 is connected to Al Qaeda or other Islamic radicals although he did visit Central America to discuss the issue.

The FBI and the “US intelligence community” are below The Keystone Cops on the competency scale. There are an estimated 10,000 MS-13 members in the US, out of 100,000 worldwide.

Get this straight. 10,000 Central American gang members are in the US, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and the buffoon Robert Clifford visits Central America to discuss an issue related to MS-13 for which “there is no basis”. Clifford expects you to believe twelve impossible things before breakfast.

Illegal immigration will define the Bush Administration a generation from now. Not Iraq

Frank Sinatra’s new song, “Strangers On My Flight”, is available here:

http://www.animatronics.org/strangers/strangers.htm

A bit more levity for this season.

I consider this very correct!

Paraphrasing Kingsley Amis, inoffensive art is worthless.

The Boston Globe endorsement of John McCain should scare most conservative voters off his candidacy. But even if you didn’t have the damning evidence in the form of this endorsement, McCain is on the wrong side of too many big issues. He’s an enemy of free speech with his unwavering support of campaign finance reform laws. He’s pro-amnesty and will revive those disastrous proposals the second he’s elected. And he wouldn’t harm a hair on bin Laden’s to get valuable intelligence information out of him.

You can make electability arguments for McCain all you like, but like the 2 Bush’s before him, he’ll harm the conservative agenda far more than he’ll advance it.

And your Gerbil, too! Cement water skis for that little rat!

The day will come to avenge Granny….

What’s 30% of sixty zillion jillion dollars?

Well, think of it this way. That’s three out of ten who can go to work for the DNC, the DLC, the CDC, the MVD or teach at major American universities.

Just One Government School Success Story Among Many - Mos Def

“Artist/Activist”? Maybe in the same way that Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis helps you to dance The Charleston.

Mr. Def: “George Washington and all them dudes was terrorists as far as the queen was concerned”.

Mr. Def: “..the Catholic Church’s stance about child molestation is a form of terrorism in and of itself”.

Mr. Def, asked whether Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks on The World Trade Center replied “absolutely not” and continued that “highly educated people in all areas of science have spoken on the fishiness around the whole 911 theory”.

I know. It’s old news, but worth getting ticked about at least one more time. The only fishiness in this episode is the gray opacity of this idiot’s eyes, and the rhetorical stink emanating from his mouth. What can you say about a sub-culture that can produce a drooling moron like this, stick a ball cap on his head and PAY HIM to be stupid on television? I wonder if he’s a liberal?

Surrender a little or surrender nothing at all

In the Fall 2005 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, Mark Helprin contributed an opinion piece entitled “Herd Animals”. In it he attempted an explanation as to why most of the American left reacted differently to the events of 911 than did the right. Helprin is/was opposed to the Iraq War, and I believe he still his. But he said…

….as the immense plumes of smoke and dust still were rising in strength from the ruins of the World Trade Center, and not a single shot had been fired or single soldier sacrificed in what was to become the War on Terrorism, the worldwide Left mobilized instantaneously to assert that such a war - the particulars and extent of which it could not know - would be unjust….

…since then many opponents and proponents of the war, despite being not even decimally aware of pertinent facts of relations, have managed to enlarge their unexamined notions into either complex and disconnected conspiracy theories involving oil, or manic crusader-atavistic visions of remaking the Arab and Muslim worlds, and that the dust from these ignorant armies, as they debate with the finesse of English football hooligans, rises into a plume of its own.

But why the essential difference?

The nature of one’s reaction to aggression against one’s country will often be determined by whether one sees the polity primarily as individuals who must struggle with the imperfection of being bound into a collective, or as a collective that must overcome the circumstantial imperfection that it comprises individuals. For wildebeest thundering across a plain in Africa, it takes a village. The herd defends itself by sacrificing a minuscule proportion of its number and moving on. If the herd were to turn upon the jackals preying upon it, the jackals would be pulverized almost instantly. Nonetheless, if the price for the escape of ten thousand is the sacrifice of only a few, this is how it is done when the collective is paramount.

But animals like bears, tigers and lions, that wander individually or in small groups, know that their survival depends upon how they fight, and their willingness to fight is so well understood that they are seldom attacked, whereas to a predator a herd in flight is a living contradiction to the maxim that there is no FREE LUNCH…

Mankind is not a genetic set piece, divided into lone wolves and lemmings, but rather the division is a reflection of habituation to the collective - indeed, worship of it - as opposed to a habitual resistance to it. Capitulation and appeasement may sometimes be merely subcategories of a controlling impulse that produces both. When The Left bends to America’s enemies it may not be a result of cowardice or betrayal, but of loyalty to the omelette so single-minded that it precludes consideration of the eggs….

You know which one you are. Stop by THIS SITE if you need a reminder, and scroll to the bottom.

….He’s back on 8-Track

Islamist dirtbag, Osama Bin Laden, issued a plea recently for Europeans to abandon their mission in Afghanistan - one which most European militaries have pursued with only desultory interest anyway.

Two reports, here and here.

To me, capturing or killing this scrawny punk has been secondary to the goal of rendering him ridiculous. The cruelest, most exquisite punishment for a figure like Bin Laden - from a shame-culture, depicted on calendars and posters in garish pastels and reflective foils - is to imprison him on video and audio instruments, leaving him nothing but a pale image and reedy voice with which to issue ludicrous threats to his tormentors, like some midget emperor in a land of giants.

Crush his corporeality, strip him of the flesh and ceremonial gaud of the Islamist conqueror. As he dissolves to unreality, the deeper his ignominy. Nothing is too harsh for this cowardly, despicable bastard. This IS a clash of cultures. Only a corrupt and dissolute culture can take him seriously.

Liberals can never do enough for people who aren’t doing the right thing. Give the hard working citizens a break by lowering their tax burdens? Not on your life. They’d rather bend over backwards to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses. Help out responsible parents by not giving their kids secret birth control? No, sir! They’re too busy cheerleading defeat in the War on Terror.

So it’s not surprising that Governor Patrick wants to gut the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) system. Lower property taxes? More efficient government? Less crime on the streets of Boston? Nope, nope, and nope when it comes to implementing all 3 of those campaign promises. His main concern is making sure that employers can’t see criminal records. And he wants to ram it through before election time next year. After all, it wouldn’t do for the taxpaying, law-abiding citizens to get in the way at the ballot box.

The liberal heart never bleeds for the good guys. It’s too busy wrecking society by lowering the bar for everyone else.

America’s first War on Terror

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. [snip] …questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Thus as Joshua London’s Victory in Tripoli elaborates in lucid prose, an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East. Moreover, these jihad depredations targeting America antedated the earliest vestiges of the Zionist movement by a century, and the formal creation of Israel by 162 years—exploding the ahistorical canard that American support for the modern Jewish state is a prerequisite for jihadist attacks on the United States.

Prevarications about history have the same results as those in science. The pinkies are wrong on global warming as well as history. Altering or deleting inconvenient facts fails to amend history. Adulterated positions may carry the moment, but never the day.

One neither can prove truth wrong, nor fallacy right; obfuscation of facts is merely a temporary position.

In Iraq, we are dallying with the future. As our gunboats crushed the Barbary Pirates, we shall have to repeat that confrontation again on a grander scale. The Marquis of Queensbury or the Geneva Convention rules will not be followed. Prepare thyself!

As much as the White House says the polls don’t matter, I bet they’d kill for a 10 point bump right about now. To be effective, you have to maintain some level of popular support. The White House may find its predicament “liberating”, but it also liberates your opponents and the wayward members of your party. At this point, it’s hard to see anything major coming out of the White House over the next 18 months.

How did the President Bush get from a very lofty popularity height to Nixonian approval ratings? Let’s start with trying to do too much. Did an unpopular president really think he could lead an unpopular war while also pushing a deeply unpopular immigration bill? Good gamblers know the odds, and they were definitely stacked against him.

Next, the White House pushed a lot of policies that were unpopular with its constituents over a long period of time. It also compounded its liberal bent with an inability to pass legislation on conservative issues like defending marriage and Social Security reform.

And while the president pushed the right away, he was never going to get a corresponding amount of support from the left. The immigration bill was very lenient, but the left felt it didn’t go far enough. Ted Kennedy wrote the No Child Left Behind Act, but liberals always claimed it was underfunded.  In reality, there was practically nothing President Bush could do to make the left happy.

Did I mention the unpopular war? The left was never going to support the War on Terror. The best result there would have been a winning effort that made criticizing it politically dangerous. That’s how the White House got votes from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to authorize the effort in the first place. But not only were they never going to garner true support from the left, the White House made the right deeply suspicious of the effort by not prosecuting it as aggressively as they could. Isn’t the whole “surge” effort a tacit admission that not every effort was being made to win the war?

Now when you combine all of the above with things like Katrina, it creates a general sense of weariness and a longing for something new. The big question in 2008 is going to be whether that weariness extends to the Republican Party or not. If it does, a lot of Republican politicians could be looking for jobs in the dreaded private sector.