Negativism at Home Could Produce Defeat Of U.S. Policy in Iraq: Unless they can't help themselves, it strikes me as political madness for Democrats to declare that the Iraq war is an "intractable quagmire" or a "grotesque mistake."
If the war turns out to be a disaster - and let's pray it doesn't - then
voters will repudiate Republican foreign policy in 2006 and 2008, and Democrats will be the beneficiaries.
So why should some Democrats now be acting as though they want to see their country lose a war? Why should they say things that may undermine the morale of U.S. forces and our Iraqi allies and contribute to a U.S. defeat?
And why should they reinforce the image of their party as being so hopelessly force-averse that it can't be trusted to lead on foreign
policy?
Barnes has alot more to say about the issue of national security in American politics, so I recommend reading it in the entirety.They Still Blame America First
At the moment, Democrats are convinced the country has turned against the war in Iraq. So House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is quite comfortable declaring the war a "grotesque mistake" and boasting that she has thought so from the start. Senator Edward Kennedy felt confident enough last week to inform American generals home from Iraq that the war is an "intractable quagmire." This prompted a sharp rebuke from General George Casey, the top commander in Iraq. "You have an insurgency with no vision, no base, limited popular support, an elected government, committed Iraqis to the democratic process, and you have Iraqi security forces that are fighting and dying for their country every day," Casey said. "Senator, that is not a quagmire....
Democrats are optimistic about the 2006 election and with some reason. The country is in a sour mood. The public may have grown tired of Bush. Democrats believe they can sell the idea Republicans are abusing their power in Congress. But Democrats can't win if they're caught in the national security trap. In an era in which America is threatened by terrorists, voters are unlikely to abandon a party that's muscular on national security for a party that isn't.
Last week, Senator Kennedy was busy chastising Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for "gross errors and mistakes" that occurred on his watch. So WHO was president and WHERE was Teddy when China was busy stealing U.S. technology that enables it to aim nukes at America's children???The Washington Times: "Officials said one of the most damaging illegal technology exports to China took place in the late 1990s. In that case, China secretly obtained technology related to the Aegis battle management system, used in the most modern U.S. warships. A Chinese front company won a contract from the system manufacturer and then stole details about Aegis, according to FBI counterintelligence officials.
By 2004, China had deployed its first two Luyang II guided-missile destroyers, both equipped with the Chinese version of the Aegis system. The Aegis system is used for tracking and shooting at enemy aircraft and also is the heart of the Navy's new sea-based missile defense.Earlier, in 1997, two American satellite companies, Space Systems/Loral and Hughes Space and Communications Co., violated U.S. export laws when they helped China fix an electrical glitch in the Long March space launch booster, which had direct applications for Chinese long-range missiles. Those missiles are aimed at U.S. cities.
From Media Research Center: Nets Skipped or Barely Touched Durbin & Clinton, Now Jump on RoveWhen Howard Dean made any number of his outlandish attacks on Republicans, Senator Hillary Clinton described Republicans as "people who have never been acquainted with the truth" and Dick Durbin slimed servicemen by equating detainee treatment at Guantanamo with Nazis and the Soviet gulag, the broadcast network evening and morning shows ignored the remarks, or got to them fleetingly months or a week or so later.
But when Karl Rove, the White House Deputy Chief-of-Staff, observed that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding to our attackers," the networks pounced within hours. ABC's World News Tonight, which had never shown the allegations from Clinton or Durbin, jumped on Rove. Anchor Elizabeth Vargas snidely asserted that Rove "was not attempting to reach across the aisle." Jake Tapper relayed how Rove's "remarks had Democrats up in arms today as they recall the bipartisan resolution to go to war against al-Qaeda." Tapper scolded: "President Bush came to office promising to change the tone in Washington. Political observers say it has changed. It's nastier." NBC's Kelly O'Donnell passed along: "Adding insult, Democrats say after 9/11, both parties stood with the President." CNN's Aaron Brown chided Rove for his "silly" comments.
Washington Post Buried Durbin, But Puts Rove on the Front Page
Like the networks, the Washington Post showed it's a lot more excited about Karl Rove, putting him on Friday's front page, after burying Dick Durbin in short stories inside.
Majority Leader : Tom Delay: Good afternoon, or, as John Kerry might say: "Bonjour!"
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I have a simple message to pass along: the national Democrat party seems to have lost its marbles.Though they remain a potent electoral machine, armed with battalions of trial lawyers and entertainers, and their Grand Coalition of the Perpetually Partisan, they are no longer a serious force in the national debate.Their single organizing philosophy is an irrational, all-encompassing, broiling hatred of George W. Bush.
They hate him for a million reasons.But most of all, Democrats hate the president because on every political issue of significance since he came into office, he has beaten them like rented mules.
Just look at their presidential candidates: it’s like they’re lost in a time warp. They want to tax like Mondale and spend like Carter. While everyone else got the memo that big-government, blame-America-first liberalism died with disco, the Howard Dean Democrats still want to party like it’s 1979!
Maybe we should thank the Democrats for shedding their moderate clothing to reveal their true Swinging-Seventies selves. But frankly, America doesn’t need a president in a hot-pink leisure suit.
Today, the United States is at war.It’s not a war of our choosing, nor of our instigation.But it is a war.The September 11th attacks were not isolated incidents, or the actions of disgruntled political dissidents.They were a premeditated assault on the freedom of every human being on this planet, and the United States is now committed to fight global terrorism with every resource at our disposal.
Containment is not an option to say nothing of appeasement. Terrorism will either be confronted – dead on – or it will destroy the free nations of the earth.But in the last 18 months, it has become clear that the extreme, Bush-hating wing of the Democrat Party has decided to either ignore or reject the fundamental realities of 21st century life.And rather than distance themselves from the hate, the party’s leaders have embraced it.
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Ridiculous as it sounds, the logical extension of the Democrat leadership’s assertion is that President Bush is an international war criminal.
If we are to take this nonsense seriously, THAT is how out of control the Democrats’ rhetoric has become.But, you see, that’s the whole point. The Democrats’ accusations AREN’T meant to be taken seriously. Because they’re unserious people.
We’re in the middle of a global conflict between good and evil and they’re in the middle of a Michael Dukakis look-alike contest.They either don’t understand or don’t care that this is a time for serious leadership.They’re just trying to change the subject, because on the issue of Iraq, they have nothing of substance to offer: only fear, and loathing, and a motley crew of presidential contenders.They’ve gone off the deep end.
Consider:
Bob Graham – a respected former governor and chairman of the intelligence committee –is calling for the president’s impeachment.
John Edwards – a so-called moderate – compares the president to a dangerous socialist.
And Dennis Kucinich – a long-time member of Congress – now calls for legislation – I love this – to ban “mind control� weapons in outer space.
These ideas aren’t unpatriotic… they’re just weird. It makes you wonder if at their next presidential debate, the Democrats are all going to show up wearing aluminum-foil helmets to protect their brain waves from the mother ship! People who believe such things cannot be trusted with national leadership, period.
From The Washington Times: China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials.Hmmm... Let's see now... WHO was President in the mid to late 90's? WHO was taking illegal campaign contributions from a guy who ran a Chinese resturant in Little Rock? WHO allowed Loral Space to illegally help China develop their nuke missile program? WHO's responsible? (Oh never mind, I guess we can just blame it on BUSH as usual)
U.S. defense and intelligence officials say all the signs point in one troubling direction: Beijing then will be forced to go to war with the United States, which has vowed to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.
...
"There's a growing consensus that at some point in the mid-to-late '90s, there was a fundamental shift in the sophistication, breadth and re-sorting of Chinese defense planning,"said Richard Lawless, a senior China-policy maker in the Pentagon.
The war fears come despite the fact that China is hosting the Olympic Games in 2008 and, therefore, some officials say, would be reluctant to invoke the international condemnation that a military attack on Taiwan would cause.
...
For China, Taiwan is not the only issue behind the buildup of military forces. Beijing also is facing a major energy shortage that, according to one Pentagon study, could lead it to use military force to seize territory with oil and gas resources.
The report produced for the Office of Net Assessment, which conducts assessments of future threats, was made public in January and warned that China's need for oil, gas and other energy resources is driving the country toward becoming an expansionist power.
...
The report stated that China will resort "to extreme, offensive and mercantilist measures when other strategies fail, to mitigate its vulnerabilities, such as seizing control of energy resources in neighboring states." U.S. officials have said two likely targets for China are the Russian Far East, which has vast oil and gas deposits, and Southeast Asia, which also has oil and gas resources.
Check your history book if you have one that hasn't been revised for politically correct content and ask yourself why Japan went to war against the United States in 1941?
Richard Fisher, vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, said that in 10 years, the Chinese army has shifted from a defensive force to an advanced military soon capable of operations ranging from space warfare to global non-nuclear cruise-missile strikes.
"Let's all wake up. The post-Cold War peace is over," Mr. Fisher said. "We are now in an arms race with a new superpower whose goal is to contain and overtake the United States."
The American Spectator: Hell hath no fury like a PBS liberal scorned. I knew that by entering the coliseum of elite liberalism a toxic tidal wave of hate mail would be released upon me, and that it would only confirm my point that PBS is the privileged playhouse of a liberal nomenklatura that will claw any conservative who dares touch or even question it. How quickly the high-brow mask of PBS partisans drops to reveal the rancid face of liberal fascism.
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The ferocious letters [ after appearing in a "Newshour" interview] to me conveyed not confidence but... the PBS partisans' panic that their liberal monolith could soon crack up. The defensive hysteria in the letters betrayed as posturing the claim in many of them that I "was pitiful" and hadn't threatened their cherished outpost. Why then were so many of them writing and calling me so desperately (some of the phone calls I received from PBS partisans were amusing in their smarmy and earnest, I-need-to-reeducate-you tone that would quickly descend into frightened barking in an attempt to silence me from further criticism of PBS)? People don't hit back that hard and with such demented invective unless you lay a glove on their favorite positions and get them disoriented and reeling.
As the barbarically vitriolic letters poured in, I thought about the advertisement Bill Moyers bought and published this week in the Washington Post in which he argued that PBS is the "core curriculum" of America, the shaper of gentle, refined souls attuned to "beauty" and wisdom. Have you met my letter writers, Mr. Moyers? They have received such an aristocratic education in the higher things from PBS they now have the tolerance and refinement of French Revolutionaries.
The pretensions of PBS's partisans are beyond parody. To puncture their we-possess-the-serene-maturity-to-save-the-Republic conceit, all you have to do is say (a) obvious liberal bias exists on PBS, and (b) taxpayers shouldn't have to finance it. That's enough to make them come unglued. Their posture of maturity and rationality will immediately give way to the primitive posture of 1960s radicalism -- a wild, essentially speechless, fascistic form of protest that throws light on liberalism's basic hostility to reason and morality.
PBS, as a decaying monument to LBJ's Great Society from which it came, is one of the left's last redoubts and they will not surrender taxpayer money without a savage fight. This requires, as the first phase of the fight, bullying and intimidating critics of PBS into silence. The answer to the paradox -- why do PBS partisans who regard themselves as apostles of tolerance and enlightenment resort so easily to intimidation and infantile exertion of will? -- is that their claims are based not on reason but on force. Their ideology is a willfulness writ large that becomes more graphic (through the use of heavy-handed tactics) as their long-standing privileges are scrutinized and withdrawn. Moreover, since liberal claims (such as the claim: no liberal bias exists on PBS) do not find any basis in reality, they cannot be rationally and calmly demonstrated, and can only be sustained through the hectoring propaganda of "editorial independence" and so forth.
The screaming at critics of PBS grows in direct proportion to the likelihood that this taxpayer-financed liberal monopoly will dissolve. And this howling just confirms the need to hasten its dissolution.
After a hard day's work at the office, what better way to relax than a visit to the local ball park? And isn't it especially thoughtful when the boss can take his hardworking Secretary..... of State along with him? President Bush and Secretary of State Rice made the game at RFK Stadium in Washington Friday night to see the Washington Nationals play the Toronto Blue Jays. I guess Laura had to stay home and make sure the new puppy Miss Beazley doesnt' chew on the antiques.
Blair does a Thatcher to the EU, only ruder: Tony Blair urged European leaders yesterday to heed 'a wake-up call' from voters, saying they should not kid themselves it was 'business as usual' after the No to the EU constitution from France and the Netherlands.
In a blunt, at times passionate, 30-minute speech to the European Parliament in Brussels the Prime Minister poured scorn on the EU's habit of responding to crises with navel-gazing and tinkering with its institutions.
Visitors in the public gallery likened his address to Margaret Thatcher's 1988 speech in Bruges, when she sounded the alarm about a 'European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels'.
They were only half-right. Compared to Lady Thatcher's Bruges oratory, Mr Blair was much ruder, mocking the EU for issuing empty declarations at times of crisis and hinting that France and Germany should tackle their own economic woes before lecturing him.
He noted acidly that the collapsed constitution had been sold as a measure to 'bring Europe closer to the people'. Yet in most member states it would now be hard to secure a Yes vote on the treaty. Time and again European summits ended with conclusions claiming that leaders were 'reconnecting Europe to the people', Mr Blair said.
'Are we?' he asked rhetorically. He was met with scattered applause, some heckling and long periods of sullen silence from MEPs.
'It is time to give ourselves a reality check - to receive the wake-up call. The people are blowing the trumpets around the city walls. Are we listening?'
"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."Did these remarks incite violence or hated by Islamo-fascists? No... only outrage by Democrats who apparently are willing to concede they are all liberals (they're still denying that the foundation of their liberal beliefs is socialism, but that's another story).
From Newsmax: I think it's a little hypocritical for Sen. Clinton to call on me to repudiate a political figure's comment, when she never asked Sen. Durbin to repudiate his comments. She never responded when asked to respond [about Durbin]. She never responded to Howard Dean's insult to every single Republican, saying that they never earned an honest day's living. She never responded to Senator Reid's unfair criticism of the president - he called the president a loser and a liar. He's never apologized - she never requested that. She never called for an apology or clarification when Moveon.org called for moderation and restraint in response to the terrorist attacks. Senator Clinton might think about her propensity to allow outrageous statements from the other side that are far beyond political dialogue - insulting every Republican, comparing our soldiers to Nazis or Soviet gulag guards - and never protesting when she serves with them." Pataki concluded: "So, when she does that, I'll be glad to listen to her call for me to ask someone to apologize."
The Senate Democrats' #2 compares the American military to Nazis, Stalinists, and Pol Pot's killer, and the story never gets near to the cover of the Washington Post. Karl Rove makes a valid assertion about the behavior of liberals, backed by evidence, and the fake outrage of those Senate Democrats makes page 1, but in a story without the pointed reply of George Pataki which happens to pivot on Durbin's slander. At least the New York Times included a portion of the Pataki quote, which has now vanished from the original Newsday article.
I'm talking about misjudgments, gross errors and mistakes. Those are on your watch. Isn't it time for you to resign?"
What Could Be Worse Than Gitmo?
By George H. Wittman
For those of us -- and there are millions -- who have gone through U.S. Army basic training or Marine Corps boot camp the complaints of Senator Richard Durbin regarding the treatment of the prisoners at Camp Delta in Guantanamo are laughable.
One wonders what Durbin and the folks at Amnesty International would say if their little darlings had been forced to stand at attention in 100-degree heat for two or more hours at Fort Jackson or Camp Lejeune in full combat gear, with 60 pounds of ammo and equipment, waiting for a general inspection. "What time did you get up, soldier?" the inspecting officer invariably asks the first trooper in line. The answer is always the same. "Reveille, sir." As long as you said that, you didn't have to admit you and your buddies had been up for 36 hours straight "G I-ing" the barracks, the company street, your weapons and everything that moved or stood in the area.
"Drop down and give me 20, 30, 50," the training cadre would demand, and the shaved head recruit falls to the ground and completes his push-ups -- sometimes to the point of exhaustion for those not in top condition. The heel of the corporal on your back tends to make the task a bit more difficult. Gosh, we should have had some of those ACLU lawyers.
Another fine element of training occurs when a drill sergeant's mouth is so close to yours his shouts spit saliva till it runs down your face. One flinch brings an order for 30 perfect push-ups or an evening of jogging around the company area with a rifle held with both hands above one's head while the miscreant shouts the General Orders.
Definitely too tough for those unfortunate terrorists.
Senator Durbin, whose biography shows he spent the Vietnam War in law school, knows nothing of an American soldier's training life -- and we are talking about only those first eight weeks of basic training, not the far tougher regimen for Ranger, SEAL, Recon or Special Forces.
He says he's appalled the Gitmo terrorists had to sit or stand in stress positions while under interrogation. What about crawling into and cleaning out an eight-foot deep grease pit attached to each mess hall. That's a nice little punishment for arriving late to formation. Or what about a 25-mile march with a full field pack, your weapon and ammo, and only one canteen of water?
Senator Durbin is deeply worried about the impression that is caused internationally when a terrorist prisoner complains his "space" has been invaded by a female interrogator. Oh, dear me, did that female make the poor prisoner feel badly? An American soldier yearns for such "intimidation." A recruit has no "space." He or she is government property.
From what type of mental illness does Senator Durbin suffer? What country has Durbin been inhabiting? From what planet does this civilian feather merchant come? Senator, don't insult the hundreds of thousands of on-duty servicemen and women and the millions of veterans by your politically inspired pettifogging complaints.
Perhaps Senator Durbin doesn't understand what it takes to be an American soldier or Marine. Perhaps he thinks the families of the terrorists should be thought of before the families of the victims of 9/11 or those of our fallen warriors. He speaks of Guantanamo as an embarrassment. It is he who embarrasses those who have served.
Durbin slanders his own country: "Throughout the last campaign season, senior Democrats had a standard line in their speeches, usually delivered with righteous anger, about how 'nobody has a right to question my patriotism!' Given that nobody was questioning their patriotism, it seemed an odd thing to harp on about. But, aware of their touchiness on the subject, I hasten to add that in what follows I am not questioning Dick Durbin's patriotism, at least not for the first couple of paragraphs. Instead, I'll begin by questioning his sanity.
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Had Durbin said, "Why, these atrocities are so terrible you would almost believe it was an account of the activities of my distinguished colleague Robert C. Byrd's fellow Klansmen," that would have been a little closer to the ballpark but still way out.
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Now let us turn to the ranking Democrat, the big cheese on the committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont. Leahy thinks Gitmo needs to be closed down and argues as follows:
"America was once very rightly viewed as a leader in human rights and the rule of law, but Guantanamo has drained our leadership, our credibility, and the world's good will for America at alarming rates."
So, until Guantanamo, America was "viewed as a leader in human rights"? Not in 2004, when Abu Ghraib was the atrocity du jour. Not in 2003, when every humanitarian organization on the planet was predicting the deaths of millions of Iraqis from cholera, dysentery and other diseases caused by America's "war for oil." Not in 2002, when the "human rights" lobby filled the streets of Vancouver and London and Rome and Sydney to protest the Bushitler's plans to end the benign reign of good King Saddam. Not the weekend before 9/11 when the human rights grandees of the U.N. "anti-racism" conference met in South Africa to demand America pay reparations for the Rwandan genocide and to cheer Robert Mugabe to the rafters for calling on Britain and America to "apologize unreservedly for their crimes against humanity." If you close Gitmo tomorrow, the world's anti-Americans will look around and within 48 hours alight on something else for Gulag of the Week
Sorry People's cube, I hot-linked to your photo, but it's Father's Day and I have to call my Dad, so didnt' have time to go through the rigamarole of posting it directly.
But anyway, back to my point: If you have to be an "accredited" journalist before you should be permitted to ask questions and report. What qualifications does Penn have? Well, if you mean by "accredited" that he's a card carrying America hating socialist, you have your answer.Ah well, if you're a Republican and make a mildly insenstive remark, you'll have to RESIGN from your leadership post. If you're a Democrat who is a former Klan organizer or a Democrat who compares our troops to Nazis, you skate free..."A Senator's Shame":By Eric Pianin Washington Post Staff Writer
June 19, 2005; Page A01In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the 'Grand Dragon' for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter. As Byrd recalls now, the Klan official, Joel L. Baskin of Arlington, Va., was so impressed with the young Byrd's organizational skills that he urged him to go into politics. 'The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation,' Baskin said.
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Byrd's indelible links to the Klan -- the "albatross around my neck," as he once described it -- shows the remarkable staying power of racial issues more than 40 years after the height of the civil rights movement. Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) learned that lesson the hard way at a birthday party in December 2002, when his nostalgic words about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), who ran for president as a
segregationist in 1948, caused a public uproar and cost Lott the majority leader's post.
Born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. in North Wilkesboro, N.C., on Nov. 20, 1917....According to his book, Byrd wrote to Samuel Green, an Atlanta doctor and "Imperial Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, in late 1941 or early 1942, expressing interest in joining. Some time later, he received the letter from Baskin, the "Grand Dragon" of mid-Atlantic states, saying he would come to Byrd's home in Crab Orchard whenever Byrd had rounded up 150 recruits for the Klan.
When Baskin finally arrived, the group gathered at the home of C.M. "Clyde" Goodwin, a former local law enforcement official. When it came time to choose the "Exalted Cyclops," the top officer in the local Klan unit, Byrd won unanimously.
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Byrd wrote that he continued as a "Kleagle" recruiting for the Klan until early 1943, when he and his family left Crab Orchard for a welding job in a Baltimore shipyard. Returning to West Virginia after World War II ended in 1945, he launched his political career, but not before writing another letter, to one of the Senate's most notorious segregationists, Theodore Bilbo (D-Miss.), complaining about the Truman administration's efforts to integrate the military.
Byrd said in the Dec. 11, 1945, letter -- which would not become public for 42 more years with the publication of a book on blacks in the military during World War II by author Graham Smith -- that he would never fight in the armed forces "with a Negro by my side." Byrd added that, "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."
Byrd's Klan past became an issue again when he joined with other southern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Byrd filibustered the bill for more than 14 hours as he argued that it abrogated principles of federalism. He criticized most anti-poverty programs except for food stamps. And in 1967, he voted against the nomination of Thurgood Marshall, the first black appointed to the Supreme Court.
The shepherd boy tending his flock near a village cried: "Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Help me or the wolf will kill my sheep!" The villagers heard him and several times came running to drive away the wolf. But he always laughed at them because he did not really see a wolf. One day a real wolf came along and attacked his flock. The boy cried "Wolf! Wolf! Wolf! Help me or the wolf will kill my sheep!" But the people did not came to his aid because no one believed him any more. So the wolf ate all his sheep.
Mark Steyn: "http://www.JewishWorldReview.com Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's kleptocrat strongman, destroyed a mosque the other day. It was in Hatcliffe Extension, a shantytown on the edge of Harare razed by the 'police.' Mugabe is an equal-opportunity razer: He also bulldozed a Catholic-run AIDS center. The government destroyed the town in order to drive the locals out into the countryside to live on the land stolen from white farmers. Quite how that's meant to benefit any of the parties involved or the broader needs of Zimbabwe is beyond me, but then I'm no expert in Afro-Marxist economic theory.
The point is the world's Muslims seem entirely cool with Infidel Bob razing a mosque. Unlike the fallout over Newsweek's fraudulent story about the Quran being flushed down a toilet, no excitable young men went bananas in Pakistan; no western progressives berated Mugabe for his 'cultural insensitivity.' And sadly most of the big shot Muslim spokespersons were still too busy flaying the Bush administration to whip their subjects into a frenzy over Hatcliffe Extension's pile of Islamic rubble.
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Gitmo has the distinction of being "a camp where the medical staff outnumber the prisoners." You'll get swifter, cleaner and more efficient treatment than most Canadians do under socialized health care. It's the only gulag in history where the detainees leave in better health and weighing more than when they arrive. This means they're in much better shape when they get back to their hectic schedule of killing infidels: Of the more than 200 who've been released, around 5 percent — that's to say, 12 — have since been recaptured on the battlefield.
Why would an organization in the human rights business want to trivialize the murder of millions in totalitarian death camps by comparing them with a non-death camp that flatters every aspect of the inmates' culture? If Gitmo's a gulag, what words are left for the systemic rape being practiced by the butchers of Darfur? Or is it because they've so exhausted the extremes of their vocabulary on Guantanamo that the world's progressives have so little to say about real horrors like Sudan?...
And would caving in to those negative perceptions lead to any better press? Nobody got killed in Gitmo, so instead America's being flayed as the planet's No. 1 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 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 Qurans than the Pentagon ever does, even though the preferred holy book of most Americans is banned in the home country of many of the prisoners, where respect for other faiths is summed up in the headline, "Seven Christians Released In Saudi Arabia On Condition They Renounce Private Religious Practice."
That was in the British Catholic newspaper, the Universe, last week, by the way. Sadly, no U.S. newspaper found room for the story due to pressures of space caused by all the "Al-Qaida Press Secretary Denounces Insufficient Respect For Koran By Rumsfeld" front page splashes. But sure, go ahead, close Gitmo and wait for the rave reviews from the media — right after the complaints that it's culturally insensitive to rebuild the World Trade Center when it's the burial site of 10 revered Muslim martyrs.
Guantanamo will be remembered not as a byword for torture but for self-torture, a Western fetish the jihad's spin doctors understand all too well.
I guess Bush should have backed Katherine Harris, after all. Sen. Mel Martinez, the Senate candidate Bush backed instead of Harris, has become the first Republican to call for shutting down Guantanamo. Martinez hasn't said where the 500 or so suspected al-Qaida operatives currently at Gitmo should be transferred to, but I understand the Neverland Ranch might soon be available.
Maybe Sen. Arlen Specter — the liberal Republican Bush backed instead of conservative Pat Toomey, which still didn't help Bush in Pennsylvania — will step forward to defend the Bush administration. That Karl Rove is a genius.
Martinez explained his nonsensical call for the closing of Guantanamo by asking: "Is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?"
There are Arabs locked up at Guantanamo, no? Admittedly, not enough. (And not under what any frequent flier would describe as "harsh conditions.") Still and all, Arabs are locked up there. That is what we call a "purpose."
By becoming a focus of evil for human rights groups, Martinez suggested, Guantanamo has become a recruiting tool for al-Qaida: "It's become an icon for bad stories," Martinez said, "and at some point you wonder the cost-benefit ratio." (I've been wondering the same thing about Mel Martinez.)
This is preposterous. NBC's "The West Wing" is an icon for bad stories; Gitmo is a place where we keep an eye on evil, dangerous people who want to kill us.
Martinez was borrowing a point from Sen. Joe Biden — which is always a dangerous gambit because you never know who said it originally. The "Biden" version was: "I think more Americans are in jeopardy as a consequence of the perception that exists worldwide with its existence than if there were no Gitmo."
So if people around the world believe that if they try to kill Americans they might go to a bad, scary place called Guantanamo, that will make them more likely to kill Americans? How about doing a cost-benefit ratio on that analysis?
Let's also pause to ponder the image of the middle-of-the-road, "centrist" Jihadist who could be "recruited" to Jihad by reports about abuse at Guantanamo. You know — the kind of guy who just watches al-Jazeera for the sports and hits the "mute" button whenever they start in about the Jews again, already.
Liberals want us to believe such a person exists and that he is perusing newspaper articles about Guantanamo trying to decide whether to finish his coffee and head off to work or to place a backpack filled with dynamite near a preschool.
Note to liberals: That doesn't happen.
What happens is this: There are thousands of Muslim extremists literally dying to slaughter Americans, and only three proven ways to stop them: (1) Kill them (the recommended method), (2) capture them and keep them locked up, or (3) convince them that their cause is lost. Guantanamo is useless for No. 1, but really pulls ahead on No. 2 and No. 3 (i.e. a "purpose").
Let's just hope aspiring Jihadists are not reading past the headlines and discovering that what Amnesty International means by "the gulag of our time" is: No Twinkie rewards for detainees!
That's not a joke. As described in infuriating detail by Heather MacDonald in the Winter, 2005, City Journal, interrogators at Guantanamo are not allowed to:
— yell at the detainees, except in extreme circumstances and only after alerting Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — and never in the ears;
— serve the detainees cold meals, except in extreme circumstances;
— poke the detainees in the chest or engage in "light pushing" without careful monitoring and approval from the commander of the U.S. Southern Central Command in Miami;
— reward detainees (for example, for not throwing feces at the guards that day) with a Twinkie or a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich in the absence of express approval from the secretary of defense. (I suppose it goes without saying, "supersizing" their order is strictly forbidden under any circumstances.)
Without careful monitoring, interrogators aren't even allowed to subject the detainees to temperature changes, unpleasant odors or sleep cycle disruptions. But on the bright side, they are allowed to play Christina Aguilera music and feed the savages the same food our soldiers eat rather than their usual orange-glazed chicken. That isn't sarcasm; these are the rules.
No cold meals, sleep deprivation or uncomfortable positions? Obviously, what we need to do is get the U.S. Army to serve drinks on commercial airlines and get the airlines to start supervising the detainees in Guantanamo.
American soldiers make do with C-rations. Dinner on an America West flight from New York to Las Vegas consists of one small bag of peanuts. Meanwhile, one recent menu for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo consisted of orange-glazed chicken, fresh fruit crepe, steamed peas and mushrooms, and rice pilaf. Sounds like the sort of thing you'd get at Windows on the World — if it still existed.
Well isn't nice that "courtiers" can help the aging monarch download "Everybody Wants to Rule the World?" And what is QE2 doing with a cell phone? Can't she just wave her hand and summon whomever?The Sun: Queen Elizabeth II has dipped into the royal purse to snap up an iPod.
The Sun said the 79-year-old sovereign had bought a six-gigabyte silver model for 169 pounds.The pocket-sized digital music players can hold up to 10,000 downloaded songs.
Queen Elizabeth's second son Prince Andrew -- fourth in line to the throne -- was reported to be behind the move, having bought his mother a mobile phone and taught her how to use it in 2001."The Queen loves music and was impressed by how small and handy the iPod is," a royal insider told the tabloid on Friday.
"Obviously it is quite complicated to download songs, but I'm sure one of the courtiers will do it for her.
"Prince Andrew will probably also help out because he's a real dab hand with gadgets."The newspaper suggested Abba's "Dancing Queen" and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears might be on the royal iPod.
Ion Mihai Pacepa on Bolton and the U.N. on National Review Online: "I know the United Nations like the back of my hand. And I have good reasons to believe we badly need a tough guy like John Bolton to handle the rudderless bureaucracy that has turned against the very country that wrote the logo of its Charter: We the People of the United Nations.
I spent two decades of my other life as a Communist spy chief, struggling to transform the U.N. into a kind of international socialist republic. The Communist bloc threw millions of dollars and thousands of people into that gigantic project. According to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, all employees from Eastern Bloc nations were involved in espionage. The task of this espionage army was not to steal secrets but to use the U.N. to convert the historical Arab and Islamic hatred of the Jews into a new hatred for Israel’s main supporter, the United States. The U.N. became our petri dish, in which we nurtured a virulent strain of hatred for America, grown from the bacteria of Communism, anti-Semitism, nationalism, jingoism, and victimology.
During the years I was Nicolae Ceausescu’s national-security adviser I learned that petty tyrants cannot be handled with kid gloves. You need an iron fist.
John Bolton not only acts forcefully, he also gets results. He singlehandedly brought about the repeal of U.N. Resolution 3379 of 1975, which stigmatized Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination.� That resolution was the Soviet bloc’s first major “victory� at the U.N. Soon after it was adopted, the Communists unleashed a vitriolic disinformation campaign portraying the U.S. as a rapacious Zionist country run by a greedy “Council of the Elders of Zion� (a derisive epithet for the U.S. Congress) that was plotting to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
U.N. Resolution 3379 lasted 16 years — until Bolton came along. In December 1991, this unknown undersecretary of State had the guts to tell the General Assembly of the U.N. that it had been manipulated by the Communists, and to ask its members to wake up. Bolton was so well-armed with documentation, so bold, and so straightforward that he forced the U.N. to repeal its own resolution by the great margin of 111 to 25. Even my native Romania, until then the epitome of Communism, voted with Bolton.
Bolton’s success did not last long. Although the Cold War was pronounced “kaput,� it did not end with a formal act of surrender, like other wars, or with the defeated enemy throwing down his weapons.
Ten years after Communism collapsed, an operation identical to the one the Communists had plotted in 1975 made its appearance at the United Nations. On August 31, 2001, a U.N. World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance opened in Durban, South Africa, to approve ostensibly pre-formulated Arab League declarations asserting that Zionism was a brutal form of racism, and that the United States was its main supporter.
The September 11 terrorist attacks came eight days after the United States had withdrawn its delegation from Durban, stating that this U.N. conference would “stand self-condemned for yielding to extremists.�
It is significant that today’s horrific terrorism has reenergized the Soviet bloc’s former agitators around the world. Antonio Negri, a professor at the University of Padua who considered the brains of the Italian Red Brigades (a terrorist group financed by the Communists) and who served time in jail for his involvement in kidnapping Prime Minister Aldo Moro, is just one example. Negri coauthored a virulently anti-American book entitled Empire, in which he justifies Islamist terrorism as being a spearhead of “postmodern revolution� against American globalization, the new “empire� he claims is breaking up nation states and creating huge unemployment. The New York Times called this modern-day Communist Manifesto “the hot, smart book of the moment.�
This is a familiar theme. For 27 years of my other life I was involved in creating various Antonio Negris throughout Western Europe and using them to spread the seductive theory of economic determinism that still defines the mindset of Europe’s Left. I helped write the lyrics to the siren song according to which America, symbolizing the world’s rich, is to blame for all the evils of the world. I was steeped in its rhetoric. To me today, these Cold War agitators revived by Kofi Annan’s U.N. are even more disturbing than the terrorists’ Kalashnikovs now aimed at us.
Nowadays it is considered bad manners to point a finger at Communist sources of anti-Americanism, but the truth is that the Soviet bloc’s old U.N. bag of dirty tricks continues to bear fruit. In 2003, the U.N. expelled the U.S. from the Commission on Human Rights by the overwhelming vote of 33 to 3. By that time the United Nations General Assembly had already passed 408 resolutions condemning Israel, the only U.N. member prohibited from holding a seat on the Security Council. The cumulative number of votes cast against Israel since 1967? 55,642.
Now Annan wants to “reform� this U.N. with help from the same Communists who deformed it. On December 2, 2004, for example, he vigorously endorsed the 101 proposals of the “High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.� One of the main members of this blue-ribbon panel is an old friend of mine, Yevgeny Primakov, a former Soviet intelligence adviser to Saddam Hussein. This is the same Primakov who rose to head Russia’s espionage service for a time, and to sing opera ditties with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright while secretly running the infamous Aldrich Ames spy case behind her back. Another prominent member is Qian Qichen, a former Red China spy who worked under diplomatic cover abroad, belonged to the Central Committee of the Communist party when it ordered the bloody Tiananmen Square repression in 1989, rose to the Politburo afterward, and later became vice-chairman of China’s State Council. And then there is Amre Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League (and a former KGB puppet), who misses the balance of power provided by the Soviet Union and is still unable to condemn — to say nothing about prevent — terrorism.
This panel recommended that the U.N. be transformed into a Communist-style welfare organization geared to eradicate the world’s poverty and its main diseases. For that, the panel concluded that the U.N.’s bureaucracy should be significantly increased, and the treasuries of its member countries additionally raided. In 1946 the U.N. budget was $21.5 million. This year it is approaching $10 billion. If Annan has his way, it will grow to over $30 billion next year, as the blue-ribbon commission wants the U.N. members to “donate� an additional $10 billion annually to fight AIDS and 0.7 percent of their GNP to reduce the debt of poor countries.
The U.N. Charter, signed in 1945, states that the purposes of the organization is to “maintain international peace,� encourage “respect for human rights,� and promote “freedom for all.� Sixty years later the world looks quite different, but, according to Freedom House, some 2.4 billion people "are denied most basic political rights and civil liberties."
Nazism, the Holocaust, and Communism were not defeated by international organizations or by blue-ribbon commissions. They were defeated by the military actions of the United States, which is now working on crushing the evil of terrorism. The U.S., not the U.N., initiated freedom’s current domino effect in the Middle East, a movement that now is even reaching into Ukraine, Georgia, and other former Soviet republics, while the U.N. is busy encouraging the growing anti-American barrage.
The U.S. is the only force on earth that has the moral authority, the experience, and the capability to reform the U.N. It is high time for Washington to take the initiative again, as it did when World War II ended.
President Bush has made clear he is interested in U.N. reform. In September 2003, he told the U.N. General Assembly, "As an original signer of the U.N. Charter, the United States of America is committed to the United Nations. And we show that commitment by working to fulfill the U.N.'s stated purposes, and give meaning to its ideals." The nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador is a step toward achieving this goal. Bolton is an impatient doer. If he had been U.S. ambassador to the U.N. any earlier we might not have seen the crazily tyrannical government of Libya chairing the Commission on Human Rights, for one thing.
Bolton has said that, if the glass zoo on the East River that quarters the United Nations “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.� Some argue that this remark makes him unfit to be ambassador at the U.N. I strongly disagree. He gets it, and the U.N. will be all the better with an Ambassador Bolton there.
— Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest ranking intelligence officer to have defected from the Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.
From Ralph Peters in the New York Post:
June 16, 2005 -- THE demands to shut down our Guantanamo lock-up for terrorists have nothing to do with human rights. They're about punishing America for our power and success.
From our ailing domestic left to overseas America haters, no one really cares about the fate of Mustapha the Murderer or Ahmed the Assassin. The lies told about Gitmo are meant to undercut U.S. foreign policy and embarrass America.
The Gitmo controversy is about many things, from jealousy of the United States and outrage that we refuse to fail, to residual anger that we won the Cold War and exploded the left's great fantasy of a dictatorship of the intellectuals. But the one thing the protests aren't about is human rights.
Except, of course, as a means to slam the United States.
Torture? Who and when? Koran abuse? I'd rather be a Koran in Gitmo than a Bible in Saudi Arabia. Illegal detentions? Suggest a better way to handle hardcore terrorists. Maltreatment? Spare me. The food the prisoners receive is better than what I had to eat in the Army.
Another thing: Would it be more humane to incarcerate the declared enemies of civilization in northern Alaska, rather than on a Caribbean beach?
Has the Bush administration made mistakes regarding Guantanamo? You bet. The biggest one was attempting to placate the critics. By launching a new investigation every time a terrorist had a toothache, our government played into the hands of its enemies.
The truth is that the terrorists and their defenders have something in common. It's not courage, which is one quality violent fanatics don't lack. It's that neither can be appeased.
Any concession only increases their appetites. The Clinton administration's reluctance to respond to terrorist strikes encouraged al Qaeda. If the Bush administration closed the Guantanamo facility, any alternative holding center would be attacked just as rabidly and dishonestly.
If we put our captives up at the Four Seasons, we'd be condemned because somebody smelled bacon at breakfast.
You can't negotiate with terrorists. And you cannot reason with ideologues — whether they're Islamist fanatics or pathetic old lefties fishing for a cause to give meaning to squandered lives. Terrorists, French and German neo-Stalinists, and our own democracy-hating intelligentsia aren't interested in facts. It's all about the comfort of belief.
Let's get this straight: Nothing we could do would appease those who feel a need for our country to fail. We must stop trying to satisfy them.
There's a military maxim that applies to all the nonsense about Gitmo: Don't let the entire battalion get bogged down by a sniper. By attempting to respond to the wild charges leveled by those who offer no solutions themselves — who have no interest in solutions — we've allowed anti-American basket cases from Harvard Yard to the German parliament to create an issue from nothing.
Oh, and thanks to the "mainstream" media for assuming that our country's always wrong.
There is a culture of torture in the world. Blessedly, America isn't part of it. When a few of our troops make mistakes, they're punished. Given the magnitude of our task and the unprecedented conditions we face, it's remarkable our errors have been so few.
What should enrage every decent citizen is that the real torturers — from Zimbabwe to China, from Syria to North Korea — get a pass from the political left. If terrorists behead defenseless captives on videotape, it's simply an expression of their culture. But if a handful of U.S. troops play an ugly round of Candid Camera, that's a new gulag.
As someone who takes human rights seriously, I'm appalled by the lack of sympathy the left feels toward the victims of any regime other than the Bush administration. Let's shout it to prisoners everywhere: If you're not harmed by an American, your suffering doesn't count.
The left's hypocrisy is immeasurable. The grandchildren of those who defended Stalin are mortified that Saddam Hussein will stand trial. By taking such irresponsible voices seriously, we grant our critics a strength they otherwise lack and simply help them keep their lies alive.
No matter what our country does, we will never please a global intelligentsia outraged that all their theories came to nothing. We can't satisfy al Qaeda, and we can't please those discontented souls who need to blame the United States for their personal inadequacies. It's time we stopped trying.
What should our nation's leaders say about Guantanamo and our treatment of captured terrorists? A lot less.
When comments are unavoidable, try this: "We're human. We make mistakes. We fix those mistakes. And we move on. Nothing will divert us from our mission of defeating terror and keeping our country safe."
Soros
Foundation Given $30 Million by US Government -- 04/25/2005: "The Open Society Institute, a private foundation controlled by liberal billionaire and political activist George Soros, received more than $30 million from U.S. government agencies between 1998 and 2003. Last year, Soros donated at least $20 million of his own money to such liberal groups as Moveon.org, in a failed attempt to block the re-election of President George W. Bush.
Tax records the Open Society Institute (OSI) is required to file with the Internal
Revenue Service list "FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES" as "Contributors" of amounts between $4.6 million and $8.9 million over a six year period:
1998 - $4,611,617
2000 - $4,934,678
2001 - $5,869,809
2002 - $6,138,125
2003 - $8,889,802
The amounts total $30,454,031. Records from 1999 and 2004 were not immediately available.
...
In an online document entitled Building Donor Partnerships, OSI explains how its various subsidiaries, called "national foundations," can get funding and other support from the governments in their home nations: public financing can be used to co-fund, expand or ensure sustainability of programs initiated by the national foundation.
When a government cannot provide funds, it can allocate land, use of facilities, media time or staff to a donor partnership.
Governments can waive or reduce taxes and duties for efforts of the Soros foundations.
Governments can publicize the programs or requests of the national foundation through official channels, often at no charge.
OSI has apparently applied this strategy in the U.S., as well. The foundation received 1.4 to 4.4 percent of its annual contributions between 1998 and 2003 from American taxpayer funding. Various State Department documents indicate that OSI has been paid to run what the department describes as "democratization programs" in a number of countries.
...
Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), told Cybercast News Service that any seemingly positive activities Soros-controlled groups engage in should be kept in perspective.
"Congress should keep in mind that this is the same organization that supports numerous hard-left radical activities in the United States and abroad," Boehm said. "The Open Society Institute gave $20,000 to the defense fund for Lynne Stewart, (who was) accused of working with the terrorists who planned the original World Trade Center attack."
Boehm said the numerous left of center political activities supported by OSI include "drug legalization efforts, pro-abortion policies and numerous other controversial causes." OSI tax records show contributions of:$4.41 million to the American Civil Liberties Union and its state affiliates,
$500,000 to the Pro-Choice Education Project to launch a (pro-abortion rights) public education and media strategy
$100,000 to the Death Penalty Information
Center, an organization that works against capital punishment,
$100,000 to Catholics for a Free Choice, a religious group that advocates for abortion rights,
$100,000 to the Pennsylvania Coalition to Save Lives Now "to support needle exchange programs,"
$80,000 over three years to the Gay Straight Alliance Network, to promote "a traveling photo documentary exhibit by lesbian, gay, transgender, queer and questioning youth,"
$45,000 to the Democracy Matters Institute "to bring the campaign finance reform movement to college campuses,"$50,000 to the Coalition for an International Criminal Court "to promote education, awareness and acceptance of the International Criminal Court," and
$35,000 to the Abortion Access Project.
Boehm also criticized taxpayer dollars going to the Soros-controlled
entity, because of the overt, partisan political activities Soros supports.
"George Soros also has been the'Daddy Warbucks' of numerous left-wing
political campaigns in the past year," Boehm said.
As Cybercast News Service previously reported, Soros pledged millions of dollars from his own estimated $7 billion personal fortune to the failed efforts to derail President Bush's re-election bid through various tax-exempt political action committees such as MoveOn.org. Boehm described the expenditures as "the height of hypocrisy.
"Soros has bankrolled the groups that have lobbied for limits on political giving and for disclosure," Boehm said. "But he apparently believes that the law should only apply to other people, and not to himself."
Schmidt impressive; DeWine not:
"One thing was clear from Tuesday's primary - whether they voted for Schmidt or McEwen or Tom Brinkman Jr., the party's most fervently conservative voters dominated the Republican primary.
And they clearly sunk DeWine's candidacy.
...
"The people who are going out to vote in this election are people who are really serious about this," said former Adams County commissioner Bob Semple of Winchester, who backed McEwen in the race. "This is not an election where people come out and vote for somebody just because they remember his name."
Therein lay DeWine's basic problem - he started this campaign with near universal name recognition - earned on his own in Hamilton County, bequeathed to him by his father, U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, in the rest of the district. That name meant instant ability to raise staggering sums of money - nearly $1 million, nearly three times the loot that other major candidates were able to amass.
But what he lacked from the start was a constituency, a large mass of highly motivated voters who would come out in the middle of June to vote for him because of his position on issues or because of long-standing support of him as a public official.
