It's true: Iraq is a quagmire

But the Real Story is Not Something You Have Heard

We've won in Iraq, and this is an accomplishment for the ages - it was really inevitable all along, supposing we kept the Drive-Bye-MSM and the democrat defeatists from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This will transform the entire Middle East - mark my words...T

We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our resources have been squandered, our best people killed, we're hated by the natives and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw.

No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe. Al-Qaida had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, al-Qaida's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.

"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audiotape posted on Islamic Web sites in December 2004. "It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."

Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous "capitals" of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.

Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.

Al-Qaida's support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group's lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida's attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.

"Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization's reputation as a defender of Islam," said StrategyPage.

Canadian columnist David Warren speculated some years ago that enticing al-Qaida to fight there was one of the reasons why President Bush decided to invade Iraq. The administration has made so many egregious mistakes that I doubt the "flypaper" strategy was deliberate. But it has worked out that way. It may have been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Iraq. But it's pretty clear now it was a blunder for al-Qaida to have done so.

You may not be aware of the calamities that have befallen al-Qaida, because our news media have paid scant attention to them.

"The situation has changed so unmistakably and so swiftly that we should be reading proud headlines daily," said Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "Where are they?"

Richard Benedetto was for many years the White House correspondent for USA Today. Now retired, he teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.

When U.S. troop deaths hit a monthly high in April, that was front-page news in most major newspapers, Mr. Benedetto noted. But when U.S. troop deaths fell in October to their lowest levels in 17 months, that news was buried on page A-14 of The Washington Post and mentioned on Page A-12 in The New York Times. (The Post-Gazette put the story on the front page.)

"I asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers," Mr. Benedetto said. "While some students said yes ... most attributed the decision to poor news judgment. They were being generous."

Mr. Peters suspects the paucity of news coverage from Iraq these days is because "things are going annoyingly well."

Rich Lowry agrees. "The United States may be the only country in world history that reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the 'narrative of defeat,' " he wrote in National Review.

If what Mr. Peters, Mr. Benedetto and Mr. Lowry suspect is true, it must have pained The Associated Press to see a correspondent write Wednesday: "The trend toward better security is indisputable." It'll be interesting to see which newspapers run the AP story, and where in the paper they place it.

"We've won the war in the real Iraq, but few people in America are familiar with anything other than its make-believe version," said the Mudville Gazette's "Greyhawk," a soldier currently serving his second tour in Iraq.
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Hillary Backs Spitzer Dropping Illegal Alien License Plan

OK, Hillary can now say, perhaps, "I was for licences for illegals before I was against it!" , as Kerry did. She just issued a statement supporting licences for illegals last week, after all. What a craven hypocrite...T

Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton today said she supports New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer’s decision to drop his plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens as vigorously as she had backed his effort to issue such licenses in the first place.

“I support what governors are trying to do to address illegal immigration,” said Sen. Clinton, “whether they’re taking action to change the system, like Gov. Spitzer was, or caving to political pressure to maintain the broken system, like Gov. Spitzer did today. I think it makes a lot of sense, and simply highlights the failure of George Bush to take Spitzer-like leadership on immigration.”

Asked whether her statement means that states should not issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, Sen. Clinton denied it and accused a reporter of trying to “play gotcha.” “I didn’t say he shouldn’t do it, nor that he should,” said Sen. Clinton, “I only said I recognize that whatever he does I can understand because George Bush makes us all do irrational things.”
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Iraqi thoughts

VDH summarises the situation on the ground in Iraq - and the geopolitical fallout, very well here. I've always said, even at the height of the insurgency, and will say again now: The quickest victory, with the fewest casualties, in the history of warfare!

There is a terrific book, that puts this all in perspective, by Norman Podhoretz - "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism" (he describes WWIII as the Cold War, ending when the Berlin wall fell)...T

The New Iraqi Debate

Now that the Democrats suspect that the U.S. is not only not losing Iraq, but may well “win”—victory being defined by stabilizing the country with a radical cessation of violence—expect the critique suddenly to morph as well.

We will soon hear that the war, while granted that it may be winnable, was not worth the commensurate cost, from liberal critics who have embraced much of the realist and neo-isolationist creed of the past (at least apart from Darfur). That is a legitimate debate—as long as opponents accept that it is a fallback position, and Harry Reid was mistaken when he announced the war “lost”.

Also expect Democrats to find ways to exaggerate the aggregate costs (like counting the rise from 20-100 dollars a barrel for oil entirely due to the Iraqi war without notice of the new Chinese/Indian demand, unrest in Africa, and declining production from the UK to the US), while Republicans will claim that Iraq is part of a larger existential war against Islamic extremism. How to resolve the dispute?

It depends on whether Iraq is stable—and the effect it has on Lebanon, Iran, Syria, the Palestinians, etc. I know such thinking is now dubbed “Neocon” warmongering and worse, but should the constitutional government in Iraq encourage reform in the region, then it would be impossible to compute all the multifarious ways in which that would contribute to world stability and US security. We’ll see, and 2008 for a variety of reasons will be interesting to say the least.

Iraqi Turn-about

I posted this thought the other day on NRO about the radical change in Iraq. There are three sub-texts rarely discussed—at least publicly—about the so-called Anbar awakening. First, oil is now $98 a barrel. Even with oil production still not quite at 2003 levels, the Iraqi government is raking in an enormous amount of cash—the equivalent of Iraq pumping about 7-8 million barrels per day at the 2002-3 price. Even if oil production were to stay flat (and some think it may climb to over 3 million b. a day by next year), Iraq might earn per annum well over $70 billion from oil alone at the present price. And for all the inefficiency and corruption, the money is starting to permeate Iraq, as any can attest from the storefronts stuffed with consumer goods and the astronomical climb in Iraqi demand for electricity. And Iraq is not the Saudi desert, but has the richest and best irrigated land in the Middle East, with an ideal commercially-strategic location, all suggesting that without Saddam’s wastrels, the country could very rapidly turn things around.

Second, the US military has eliminated a large number of terrorists, insurgents and general terrorists since 2003. Given the noxious fumes of Vietnam-era “body-counts” we don’t mention this. But many of the sheiks suffered horrendous losses among their tribes to the US in the past four years that led to some demoralization and the simple absence of their more skilled and veteran fighters. So, when they weighed the odds—increasing oil-generated wealth on the one hand versus being mowed down by the US on the other—the choice was to join us.

Third, for all the criticism of the Shiite government, it continued to function despite hourly threats and constant assassinations, both from Iranian-backed extremists and Sunni-backed Al-Qaedists. It has been a congressional pastime to trash the Iraqis, but few people in the world have so braved daily mayhem and still clung to a constitutional government process, however sometimes exasperating.

I’m not suggesting that the repugnance of al Qaeda, concern that the US pressure the Shiite government to help Sunnis, or machinations about the future did not play a role in bringing the Sunni tribes to our sides. But the notion that life could be pretty good with oil wealth and without US bullets—coupled with the acknowledgment that the elected government wasn’t going to quit or flee—played a large role in turning things around.
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A Watershed Moment on Immigration

Finally a clear articulation of this issue, with which I fully agree...T

October 2007 may turn out to be the month that immigration became a key issue in presidential politics. It hasn't been, at least in my lifetime.

The Immigration Act of 1965, which turned out to open up America to mass immigration after four decades of restrictive laws, wasn't one of the Great Society issues Lyndon Johnson emphasized in 1964. The Immigration Act of 1986, which legalized millions of illegal immigrants but whose border and workplace provisions have never been effectively enforced, was a bipartisan measure unmentioned in the debates between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.

There was no perceptible difference on immigration between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Both favored a comprehensive bill with legalization and guest-worker provisions. John Kerry in 2006 and 2007 voted for immigration bills along the lines supported by Bush.

Now, things look different. In the Democratic debate on Oct. 30, Tim Russert demanded to know whether Hillary Clinton supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's policy of issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. The forthright answer: yes and no. A clarifying statement by the Clinton campaign later in the week did not much clarify things: a hedged yes. It was one of several issues on which Clinton seemed to take calculating and ambiguous non-positions. But it is one that may have major reverberations in the presidential campaign -- and in congressional races, as well.

The reason is that the Democrats -- and Bush -- are out of line with public opinion on the issue. That became clear as the Senate debated a comprehensive immigration bill in May and June. Most Republicans and many Democrats, in the Senate and among the public, turned against the bill. Supporters of the bill tended to ascribe that to something like racism: They just don't like having so many Mexicans around.

But if you listened to the opponents, you heard something else. They want the current law to be enforced. It bothers them that we have something like 12 million illegal immigrants in our country. It bothers them that most of the southern border is unfenced and unpatrolled. It bothers them that illegal immigrants routinely use forged documents to get jobs -- or are given jobs with no documents at all.

You don't have to be a racist to be bothered by such things. You just have to be a citizen who thinks that massive failure to enforce the law is corrosive to society.

That was apparent to me as I listened to a focus group of Republican voters in suburban Richmond, Va., conducted by Peter Hart for the Annenberg School of Communications. One voter after another complained that the immigration laws were not being enforced. None of them made any derogatory remarks about Latino immigrants -- two said they admired how hard they work. They don't want to see Latinos banished from this country. They want the immigrants here to be legally here.

Which leaves Democratic politicians and political candidates out on a pretty flimsy limb. Most of them reflexively back a comprehensive bill, and some of them (like Bush and a number of Republicans backing such a bill) have dismissed opponents as racists.

Most Democrats have also been backing bills extending various benefits to illegal immigrants, like the Dream Act for college education for illegals brought over as children. There are appealing arguments for such bills. But most voters reject them. And most voters certainly reject driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. That was one of the issues that led to the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in California in 2003.

The Republican presidential candidates have taken note. Only John McCain, a longtime backer of a comprehensive bill, stands apart, and he concedes that voters are demanding tougher enforcement. In the special congressional election in Massachusetts on Oct. 5, the Republican was able to hold the Democrat to 51 percent by stressing immigration as one of his two top issues.

Other Republicans are likely to echo that theme next fall. And the Democratic presidential nominee (unless Chris Dodd gets the nod) is going to have to explain why she or he believes it's a good idea to give illegal immigrants driver's licenses.

The last several Democratic nominees could have said that they're just taking the same position as their Republican opponent. The 2008 nominee won't be able to say the same of hers or his (unless McCain gets the nod).

"The centrality of illegal immigration to the current discontent about the direction of the country may be taking us back again to a welfare moment," write the shrewd Democratic strategists James Carville and Stanley Greenberg. Yup.
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Breck Girl Ad Slams Mrs. Clinton

This is the kind of add we need to do in the general election, as Rush said today...T

A Day Later, Clinton Embraces Spitzer’s License Effort

That's it, she's toast! no way she wins in the General election now. Independents recoil from giving drivers licences to Illegals (after which, they could easily obtain passports and welfare and other document entitling them to government largess).

Lost in the "She tries to have it both ways" spin lifesaver that the Drive By's have thrown to her is the fact, recorded here below, that she is now on record as officially endorsing this crazy idea. This is eerily reminiscent of Michael Dukakis and Willie Horton, in what it says about the values of the candidate...T

A day after she appeared to struggle to give her views on the subject, Hillary Rodham Clinton offered support today for Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s effort to award New York driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, as her campaign sought to contain potentially damaging fallout from a what her own supporters saw as a tense and listless debate performance.

Mrs. Clinton’s statement affirming her support of Mr. Spitzer in his office came less than a day after she offered a muddled and hesitant position on the bill, prompting a round of denunciations by her opponents. It signaled the extent to which her advisers viewed that moment as the biggest misstep she made in the debate, and one with long-term potential to undermine her candidacy.

“Senator Clinton supports governors like Governor Spitzer who believe they need such a measure to deal with the crisis caused by this administration’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform,’” her campaign said.

Mrs. Clinton’s voice of support for Mr. Spitzer’s plan suggested her advisers believed it was politically wiser to embrace a position that could clearly hurt her in a general election rather than risk providing more fuel to what has emerged as a damaging line of criticism: That she, taking advantage of her dominant position in some polls, is not being candid about her views and about would she would do as president.

That argument was voiced by Senator Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, in an interview leading up to the debate and set the framework for two hours of attacks on Mrs. Clinton. And it continued this morning as Democratic and Republican presidential candidates attacked her for her answer on Social Security.

“She is a habitual evader,” said Mr. Obama’s senior strategist, David Axelrod.
And Rudolph W. Giuliani, the Republican presidential candidate who has spent more time attacking Mrs. Clinton than any of his opponents, pounced as he offered a preview of what a Clinton-Giuliani race might be like, should both win their party’s nomination, in a radio interview with Glenn Beck.

“You know, she was being attacked all night for taking different positions in front of different audiences and then by the end of the night, she took different positions in front of the same audience,” he said. “It was pretty amazing. I mean, in politics I’ve never quite seen that before.”
Gerald W. McEntee, presented Mrs. Clinton with a pair of red boxing gloves today. (Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign fought back on a variety of fronts. It announced that she had won the endorsement of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union in a Washington news conference in which its president, Gerald W. McEntee, presented Mrs. Clinton with a pair of red boxing gloves and tried to put the best light on her performance the night before.

“Six guys against Hillary,” he said. “I’d call that a fair fight. This is one strong woman.”
Mrs. Clinton hoisted the gloves, declaring: “When it comes to fighting for America’s famlies I’ll go 10 rounds with anyone.”

Her campaign sought to stir sympathy of Mrs. Clinton -– in a way that was reminiscent of what happened after she was confronted by Rick Lazio, the Long Island Republican, in their Senate race in 2000 — by suggesting that she was the victim of ganging-up by a stage of presidential opponents and one of the moderators, Tim Russert.

“The Politics of Pile-On,” Mrs. Clintons’ Web site announced this morning. “What happens when the ‘politics of pile-on’ replaces the ‘politics of hope.’” The campaign later released a video that featured Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic rivals saying her name repeatedly. A headline on the Drudge Report, which said it was reflecting thinking in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, read, “Scorn: As the Men Gang Up.”

Taken together, the events of the day suggested the difficulties Mrs. Clinton faces as she in effect tries to bridge two very different electorates: Democratic primary voters and general election voters. Going into the debate last night, she had been largely successful offering views on Iran, Iraq, and Social Security tailored to a general election audience
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Gun Free Zones

Another gem from CornetJim - A generation ago, Charles Bronson and Dirty Harry "blew away" the silly arguments of liberals that you could ban legal guns, and not worry about the illegal ones...but now they are back... c'mon Clint! saddle up!!!...T

Stossel- Al Gore Global Warming Myth

Yes - even the Drive by media has some thoughtful members. Here's John Stossel on this week's "20/20"...people who believe in man made, CO2 driven warming are either ignorant of the facts, or part of the deception - it really is that conclusive. Fact: even the most die hard warming scientist will tell you that the damage has already been done - that even if all CO2 emission is immediately halted (devastating beyond repair the world economy), it's too late to stop the coming warming. Ponder that while you wonder, then, "why do they want what they claim they want"...T

Victory Is Within Reach in Iraq

Again - The most successful campaign, with the fewest casualties, in the history of warfare (Drive-by-media flagellation's aside). We are winning a spectacular victory, one that still remains hidden to the public eye...T

Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.

Almost exactly 13 months ago, the top Marine intelligence officer in Iraq wrote that the grim situation in Anbar province would continue to deteriorate unless an additional division was sent in, along with substantial economic aid. Today, Marine leaders are musing openly about clearing out of Anbar, not because it is a lost cause, but because we have defeated al Qaeda there.

In Fallujah, enlisted marines have complained to an officer of my acquaintance: "There's nobody to shoot here, sir. If it's just going to be building schools and hospitals, that's what the Army is for, isn't it?" Throughout the area, Sunni sheikhs have joined the Marines to drive out al Qaeda, and this template has spread to Diyala Province, and even to many neighborhoods in Baghdad itself, where Shiites are fighting their erstwhile heroes in the Mahdi Army.

British troops are on their way out of Basra, and it was widely expected that Iranian-backed Shiite militias would impose a brutal domination of the city, That hasn't happened. Lt. Col. Patrick Sanders, stationed near Basra, confirmed that violence in Basra has dropped precipitously in recent weeks. He gives most of the credit to the work of Iraqi soldiers and police.

As evidence of success mounts, skeptics often say that while military operations have gone well, there is still no sign of political movement to bind up the bloody wounds in the Iraqi body politic. Recent events suggest otherwise. Just a few days ago, Ammar al-Hakim, the son of and presumed successor to the country's most important Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, went to Anbar's capital, Ramadi, to meet with Sunni sheikhs. The act, and his words, were amazing. "Iraq does not belong to the Sunnis or the Shiites alone; nor does it belong to the Arabs or the Kurds and Turkomen," he said. "Today, we must stand up and declare that Iraq is for all Iraqis."

Mr. Hakim's call for national unity mirrors last month's pilgrimage to Najaf, the epicenter of Iraqi Shiism, by Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni. There he visited Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shiite cleric. The visit symbolically endorsed Mr. Sistani's role as the most authoritative religious figure in Iraq. Mr. Hashemi has also been working closely with Mr. Hakim's people, as well as with the Kurds. Elsewhere, similar efforts at ecumenical healing proceed rapidly. As Robert McFarlane reported in these pages, Baghdad's Anglican Canon, Andrew White, has organized meetings of leading Iraqi Christian, Sunni and Shiite clerics, all of whom called for nation-wide reconciliation.

The Iraqi people seem to be turning against the terrorists, even against those who have been in cahoots with the terror masters in Tehran. As Col. Sanders puts it, "while we were down in Basra, an awful lot of the violence against us was enabled, sponsored and equipped by. . . Iran. [But] what has united a lot of the militias was a sense of Iraqi nationalism, and they resent interference by Iran."

How is one to explain this turn of events? While our canny military leaders have been careful to give the lion's share of the credit to terrorist excesses and locals' courage, the most logical explanation comes from the late David Galula, the French colonel who fought in Algeria and then wrote "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice" in the 1960s. He argued that insurgencies are revolutionary wars whose outcome is determined by control of, and support from, the population. The best way to think about such wars is to imagine the board game of Go. Each side starts with limited assets, each has the support of a minority of the territory and the population. Each has some assets within the enemy's sphere of influence. The game ends when one side takes control of the majority of the population, and thus the territory.

Whoever gains popular support wins the war. Galula realized that while revolutionary ideology is central to the creation of an insurgency, it has very little to do with the outcome. That is determined by politics, and, just as in an election, the people choose the winner.

In the early phases of the conflict, the people remain as neutral as they can, simply trying to stay alive. As the war escalates, they are eventually forced to make a choice, to place a bet, and that bet becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The people have the winning piece on the board: intelligence. Once the Iraqis decided that we were going to win, they provided us with information about the terrorists: who they were, where they were, what they were planning, where their weapons were stashed, and so forth.

It's easy to say, but quite beside the point, that any smart Iraqi would prefer us to the terrorists. We're short-termers, while the terrorists promise to stay forever and make Iraq part of an oppressive caliphate. We're going to leave in a few years, and put the country in Iraqi hands, while the terrorists -- many of whom are the cat's-paws of foreign powers -- intend to turn the place into an alien domain. We promise freedom, while the jihadis impose clerical fascism and slaughter their fellow Arab Muslims.

But that preference isn't enough to explain the dramatic turnaround -- the nature of the terrorists was luminously clear a year ago, when the battle for Iraq was going badly. As Galula elegantly observed, "which side gives the best protection, which one threatens the most, which one is likely to win, these are the criteria governing the population's stand. So much the better, of course, if popularity and effectiveness are combined."

The turnaround took place because we started to defeat the terrorists, at a time that roughly coincides with the surge. There is a tendency to treat the surge as a mere increase in numbers, but its most important component was the change in doctrine. Instead of keeping too many of our soldiers off the battlefield in remote and heavily fortified mega-bases, we put them into the field. Instead of reacting to the terrorists' initiatives, we went after them. No longer were we going to maintain the polite fiction that we were in Iraq to train the locals so that they could fight the war. Instead, we aggressively engaged our enemies. It was at that point that the Iraqi people placed their decisive bet.

Herschel Smith, of the blog Captain's Journal, puts it neatly in describing the events in Anbar: "There is no point in fighting forces (U.S. Marines) who will not be beaten and who will not go away." We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it.

No doubt Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno know all this. It is, after all, their strategy that has produced the good news. Their reluctance to take credit for the defeat of al Qaeda and other terrorists in Iraq is due to the uncertain outcome of the big battle now being waged here at home. They, and our soldiers, fear that the political class in Washington may yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They know that Iran and Syria still have a free shot at us across long borders, and Gen. Petraeus told Congress last month that it would not be possible to win in Iraq if our mission were restricted to that country.

Not a day goes by without one of our commanders shouting to the four winds that the Iranians are operating all over Iraq, and that virtually all the suicide terrorists are foreigners, sent in from Syria. We have done great damage to their forces on the battlefield, but they can always escalate, and we still have no policy to direct against the terror masters in Damascus and Tehran. That problem is not going to be resolved by sound counterinsurgency strategy alone, no matter how brilliantly executed
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The Great Global Warming Swindle

"Global Warming" is back in the news lately. McCain, B. Hussein Obama and Hitlery all agree. Michael Bloomberg, the fatuous mayor of New York said it is more devastating than Nuclear War! (never underestimate the power of a political hack to exagerrate). So, here, again, proof positive to the contrary, from the BBC, Greenpeace, and the world's foremost climatology experts.

As suggested by the apt title, this program — essential viewing for politicians, teachers, motorists and the entire transport sector, grass roots environmentalists and all 'True Believers' in man-made climate change — will reveal and confirm:

- How the Sun is an overwhelming influence on continuous climate change over decades and centuries (there is no way for taxation or lifestyle fascism to alter the Sun's eruptivity and irradiance)

- How carbon dioxide levels are predominantly an effect and not a cause of climate change (a very inconvenient truth)

- Why politicians have been so enthusiastic about embracing the fallacy of human impact on global climate (trojan horses aren't a protected species)

- What lies behind the green industry (courtesy of a founding member and former leader of Greenpeace)

- How forecasts of warming and its impacts are grossly exaggerated, with stasis and cooling ahead, and therefore why the UN IPCC needs urgent fundamental reform - or abolishing completely...T

Global Warming? Really Bad?

John Stossel devastates the Goreacle. The Science is settled: Al Gore is a fat buffoon...T

Rudy and the Religious Right's Denial

I understand when the MSM covers our public discourse in cartoonish sound bites - Yes I've come to expect this, especially when they cover Conservatives and Republicans. But to see OUR side lazily doing the same, after all we had to go through to educate the populace and get Reagan elected president, to get Congress back, and pass the Contract with America - this troubles me greatly. Rudy is NOT a Social Liberal - he IS an intellectually honest man. A man who tells the whole truth, the whole story. A man who understands that to educate, you must communicate effectively. Listen to him, conservative America...T

“The most important ‘traditional value’ in this election is keeping the Clintons out of the White House,” says Greg Alterton, an evangelical Christian who writes for SoConsForRudy.com and counts himself among Rudolph W. Giuliani’s social-conservative supporters.

People like Alterton are important, if overlooked, in the Republican presidential sweepstakes. Anti-Giuliani Religious Rightists are far more visible. Also conspicuous are pundits whose cartoon version of social conservatism regards abortion and gay rights as “the social issues,” excluding other traditionalist concerns.

New York’s former mayor “has abandoned social conservatism,” commentator Maggie Gallagher complains. He “is anathema to social conservatives,” veteran columnist Robert Novak recently wrote. Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson has said: “I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008.” Dobson and a cadre of Religious Right leaders threaten to deploy a pro-life, third-party candidate should Giuliani be nominated.

This “Rudyphobia” ignores Giuliani’s pro-family/anti-abortion ideas, his socially conservative mayoral record, and his popularity among churchgoing Republicans.

While Giuliani accepts a woman’s right to an abortion, he told Iowa voters in August: “By working together to promote personal responsibility and a culture of life, Americans can limit abortions and increase adoptions.” Among Giuliani’s relevant proposals:

*“My administration will streamline the adoption process by removing the heartbreaking bureaucratic delays that burden the current process.” Giuliani notes that sclerotic court schedules, exhausted social workers, and tangled red tape prevent moms and dads from adopting some 115,000 boys and girls in foster care.

*Giuliani wants the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to promote organizations that help women choose adoption over abortion.

*He would like to make permanent the $10,000 adoption tax credit.

*Giuliani also would encourage states and cities to report timely and complete statistics to measure progress in abortion reduction.

This is no sudden conversion on the road to Washington. As mayor, Giuliani did nothing to advance abortion. On his watch, total abortions fell 13 percent across America, but slid 17 percent in New York. Between 1993 and 2001, Gotham’s tax-funded Medicaid abortions plunged 23 percent.

Giuliani’s campaign for personal responsibility created a climate that seemingly discouraged abortion. Moving 58 percent of recipients from welfare to work may have encouraged women and men to avoid unwanted pregnancies. New York’s 57 percent overall-crime reduction and 67 percent homicide drop probably reinforced such self-control.

Compared to the eight Democratic years before he arrived, adoptions under Giuliani soared 133 percent.

*Giuliani also proposed eliminating the city’s $2,000 marriage penalty. He chopped it to $400.

*Giuliani opposed gay marriage in 1989. “My definition of family is what it is,” Giuliani told Newsday 18 years ago. “It does not include gay marriage as part of that definition.”

*He jettisoned New York’s minority and women-owned business set-aside program. Giuliani explained: “The whole idea of quotas to me perpetuates discrimination.”

*Giuliani sliced or scrapped 23 taxes totaling $9.8 billion and shrank Gotham’s tax burden 17 percent.
This left parents more money for children’s healthcare, private-school tuition, etc.

Giuliani could have governed comfortably as a pro-abortion, pro-welfare, pro-quota, soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend, liberal Republican. Instead, Giuliani relentlessly pushed Reaganesque socio-economic reforms through a City Council populated by seven Republicans and 44 Democrats.

These accomplishments may explain why he leads his competitors and impresses churchgoers. Among Republicans in an October 3 ABC/Washington Post poll, Giuliani outran former senator Fred Thompson, 34 percent to 17, versus Senator John McCain’s 12 percent, and Willard Mitt Romney’s 11.
As “most electable,” Giuliani scored 50 percent, versus McCain’s 15, Thompson’s 13, and Romney’s 6.

An October 3 Gallup survey found Giuliani enjoying a 38 percent net-favorable rating among churchgoing Catholics, compared to McCain’s 29, and Thompson’s 25. Among Protestant churchgoers, Thompson edges Giuliani 26 percent to 23, with McCain at 16, and Romney at 7.

Religious Right leaders should study Giuliani’s entire, socially conservative record, not just the “socially liberal” caricature of it that hostile commentators and lazy journalists keep sketching. Social conservatives should not make the perfect the enemy of the outstanding. Ultimately, they should recognize that a pro-life, third-party candidate would subtract votes from Giuliani in November 2008.

This would raise the curtain on a 3-D horror movie for social conservatives: “The Clintons Reconquer Washington” — bigger, badder, and more vindictive than ever

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How Modern Liberals Think

Absolutely devastating! Whitaker Chambers would be proud - a must see clip (a long one as well ), but better than through years of study, you will finally understand. Thanks CornetJim...T

The Traitor's Cowards

Liars, hypocrite's, traitors...T

Traitor

A thief, a liar, and a sociopath - and there are two of them...T

The Realignment of Iraq - We're winning because the Iraqis want us to--Moqtada al-Sadr included

Facts on the ground - not media BS...The most successful war, with the fewest casualties, in the history of warfare...T

The war in Iraq was always going to be won by the Iraqis, and so it has proven. But the Iraqis who have won it are on our side.

It was in the spring of 2004--a month or so before I first arrived in Baghdad in a taxi to stay in a small hotel--that the Sunnis launched their disastrous insurgency. Its defeat is becoming ever more clear this autumn as new reports reach us of the patriotic stand of the Anbar tribes, the pacification and nascent prosperity of Fallujah and Ramadi, the isolation of al Qaeda, and the peace overtures of defeated Baathists.

That first season of serious fighting also included the time of the original uprising by the poor Shiites of Iraq, led by Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army. Six times during that fighting I drove with Iraqis through the so-called Death Triangle of Sunni towns south of Baghdad to cover the events in Najaf. Surrounded on the highway by pickup trucks carrying chanting Mahdi Army fighters and caskets bearing the dead from the Sadr City fighting, one would see the green and black flags of the Shiite saints atop houses and feel safe.

Why did it feel so good to see those Shiite flags? Why was the Death Triangle so lethal? What on earth were the Mahdi fighters doing trying to fight the U.S. Marines and Cavalry head-on in pitched battles?

The last three years in Iraq have evolved as the answers to those questions suggested they would. The leaning, rag-like Shiite flags were good news because it was Sunnis, not Shiites, who beheaded people. Islamic violence in Iraq was then as now a phenomenon of the Wahhabis--Sunni fundamentalists. The Sunnis also did the kidnapping, and were the ones behind the car bombs that targeted random civilians.

The Death Triangle was so bad because the Baathists who lived there, angry to have lost their apartheid privileges, desperate for the chaos that might derail the new project, would sell you to the Wahhabis, who would cut your head off to make good TV to erode the will to fight the chaos. The Mahdi fighters were dying not because their leaders thought they could beat the Americans in battle, for their leaders were too clever to think that, but to earn Mr. Sadr his nationalist credentials as the only important Iraqi--Shiite or otherwise--to stand up and fight the Americans.

Mr. Sadr's eyes, we learned at Najaf, were on domestic politics. It was clear then that his skinny men with their pickup trucks and light arms, men who on that road down from Baghdad were as scared as I was of the Sunni minorities, lacked the muscle to take over the country. Domestic politics for Mr. Sadr could never mean the whole cake, but only as much of it as he could grab. If he was as rational as his success in pushing the Americans to the very brink of his destruction--but never beyond it--in both of his two rebellions indicated he was, the ballot box, promised for 2005, would be where he fought his next battles.

These outlines of Iraqi politics duly asserted themselves over the last three years, providing the basis for the victory that is happening today. The Baathist Sunnis continued to kill to get back what they used to have, until accepting this past summer that they had suffered an historic defeat in a Battle of Baghdad of their own calamitous making. Shiite Iraq has arrived to stay, and today the drawing rooms of Baghdad's dealmakers are full of Baathists, cap in hand, terrified of the Shiite death squads they inspired and hungry for their slice of the coming oil pie. Meanwhile the Wahhabis, mostly foreigners, answering to a higher power and blind to selfish thoughts of wealth and survival, continue to kill but find themselves increasingly unwanted.

A third element of the Sunni violence was tribal. This was particularly prevalent in Anbar province in western Iraq, where Sunni tribes have traditionally prospered from banditry on the Damascus road. Fighting outsiders is an old habit in Iraq's Sunni bandit country. So is making money, and Anbar today, as Iraqis prepare to gorge themselves at the oil trough, is one of the safer places in Iraq.

It was always clear that Iraq's Sunni tribes would eventually take up arms against the Saudis, Jordanians and Syrians in their midst who were banning smoking, killing whisky vendors, blowing up their utilities and oil infrastructure, executing sheikhs of ancient tribes, and forcibly marrying local girls to "emirs" of the absurd Islamic State of Iraq. Anbar's tribal leaders and Baathists were going to be bought off eventually, either directly or by the indirect promise of owning a chunk of what will be a very rich country.
At least 14,000 Anbari young men have joined the state security services since the surge began in February and Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, started reaching out to the chiefs. Now the insurgency has decamped to other provinces, where it does not want to be. Beating them there will be even easier, as is proving to be the case in Diyala.

As for Mr. Sadr, I reported the first hints of his democratic conversion in 2004 when a member of his top political committee told me Mr. Sadr was going to start a political party and contest the elections when they came. He still has not formed such a party, but as I saw up close when I later spent five weeks of the December 2005 election period embedded in Sadr City with his Mahdi Army, he embraced electoral politics with subtlety and enthusiasm.

Of course he did: He is the leader of the country's biggest popular movement. Today, controlling five major ministries and about 30 members of Parliament (one of the two largest blocs in the government) he underwrites the pluralist project in Iraq as he has done since late 2004.

So--with the Sunni insurgency defeated, the Shiite nationalists inside the government, breakup and true civil war avoided, Iran a pest at worst, regional sectarian disruption a fantasy and a White House that will not be forced into declarations of defeat by three IEDs a day--the main questions of Iraqi politics have been resolved. Despite the huge prices paid for these victories, the resolutions have mostly been for the best.

Violence continues in Iraq, but it is mostly local: revenge cycles, factionalism, crime, brutal neighborhood power plays. And it is declining. Iraqi civilian deaths in September, like U.S. military deaths, had halved since their highs earlier this year. By December they will be much lower.

Meanwhile reconciliation, which will never be complete, is happening. We saw, with the huge success of the two 2005 elections and the week-long nationwide celebrations attending the soccer victory this July, that deep unities have survived the 35-year Baath nightmare. The Kurds and Shiites can be forgiven for not wanting to reward the Sunnis immediately for the destructive insurgency that followed those 35 years of apartheid and genocide.

But from the local level to the national, the huge majority of Iraqis are showing enormous tolerance. Federal money is being pumped into Anbar, and in Baghdad this year over 30 Sunni mosques have been reopened by the government, mostly in the mainly Shiite east of the city. Today the Mahdi Army and the Sunni tribes in the Death Triangle are negotiating a modus vivendi. Sheikh Fawaz al Gerba, a Sunni sheikh and former general, is doing the same around Mosul. And Shiekh Harith al Dari, as head of the Association of Islamic Scholars, the leading Sunni group, which many Iraqis used to call the Association of Islamic Kidnappers, is doing it with Shiites in various parts of the country.

The biggest unifier of all currently might be the most predictable one. Help from foreigners is welcome in Iraq. The country's elected prime minister, possessing after Iraq's heroic elections more popular legitimacy than almost any leader in the world, often points out that the Coalition is there as invited guests. When the U.S. Senate passed its disingenuous "plan" for extreme federalism in Iraq last week, the uproar in the country crossed the sectarian divide. Iraq already has a constitution. It was written by freely elected Iraqis and ratified overwhelmingly by the public in a brave vote two years ago.

Thousands of Americans and their allies have died helping to give Iraqis this opportunity. We have shown enormous skill and bravery in helping them fight their enemies, and immeasurable goodwill in sending our young men to protect Iraqi schools, mosques and polling booths. The reason we and Iraqis are winning this war together is that its purpose is to give Iraqis what they want.
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Smearing Rush

These people are despicable - truly without conscience and conviction. Except when it comes to actively wishing for, and working to achieve, the defeat of the United States of America. Defeat Militarily to be sure, but also defeat in the sense of wishing the decline and fall of our Judeo-Christian, Western European, English speaking cultural heritage.

The Main Stream Media (MSM) you say? No - The Clinton's, very specifically Hillary & Bill. It's not just selling nuclear secrets to the Chinese for campaign $$ anymore. It's not Pardoning an Fugitive Arms dealer who was then, and is now, selling nuclear secrets, arms, and drugs to terrorists and the Iranian regime, just so Bill Clinton could keep on having sex with said arm's merchant's wife, Denise Rich. No, just read on, and please have one cocktail first. Because this time you're going to be angry...T

Instapundit collects the links on the bizarre attempt to smear Rush for reporting the "phony soldier" story (previously reported by ABC.) : Smearing Rush

Because of its attack on General Petraeus, the MoveOn.org brand is badly damaged where it matters most --Americans who deeply esteem the military, which is the great majority of Americans. The attempt to label Rush as other than the great supporter of the military that he is is a transparent and desperate attempt to create a counter-scandal.

Not only has it failed, it has backfired, and thrown additional light on the extremism of the left and underscores that the Democratic candidates in thrall to this left --especially Hillary-- are going to be carrying a significant burden into the general election. Hillary and her MoveOn.org pals make the San Francisco Democrats of 1984 look moderate by comparison, and this latest attempt to dent Rush's effectiveness is another exhibit in the mounting pile of evidence that the Democrats have gone radical during their wilderness years.

Powerline also comments : "Battlespace Preparation"

We noted here and here the phony attacks on Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly by "Media Matters," a Soros-financed cog in the Clinton machine. These attacks were completely without merit, yet they garnered a remarkable amount of play in the mainstream media. Glenn Reynolds connects the dots between these scurrilous attacks and the 2008 election:

IT'S NOT A "SMEAR" -- it's better understood as "battlespace preparation." And the target is the traditional media; the intent is to limit the ability of people like Limbaugh or O'Reilly to drive stories in the mainstream news as we get closer to the election. Expect more of this, with more targets.

I think that's right. Media Matters knows that anyone who looks into its charges will know that they are bogus. But that's almost beside the point. Their objective (i.e., the Clintons' objective) is to arm fellow-liberal mainstream media outlets with excuses to ignore Limbaugh ("He insulted the troops!") and O'Reilly ("He's a racist!") as the election approaches. It's all about putting Bill Clinton back in the White House.


some blowback. : The Group Behind Smear Campaigns Against Limbaugh and O’Reilly -

Last week, two of the leading conservatives in the media, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, were dishonestly and unprofessionally attacked by press outlets that cherry-picked out of context remarks from lengthy radio broadcasts in order to vilify outspoken personalities whose opinions they don’t agree with.

Unfortunately, as folks around the country saw this play out on their television sets and newspapers, few were at all familiar with the organization behind the smear campaigns, or that this same group started the firestorm which ended with radio host Don Imus being terminated by NBC and CBS in April.

Maybe more importantly, even fewer citizens are aware that this organization is linked directly to Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as billionaire leftist George Soros.

For some background, John Perazzo wrote a column for FrontPage Magazine in July entitled “Media Matters: Hillary’s Lap Dogs,” that should be must-reading for all citizens interested in who's targeting America’s leading conservative personalities (emphasis added throughout):

Established in May 2004, Media Matters identifies itself as “a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media”—particularly information “that forwards the conservative agenda.” The organization was founded by the conservative-turned-leftist journalist David Brock, who says he created Media Matters “to combat” what he characterizes as the largely successful effort of “the right wing in this country” to “mov[e] the media itself to the right” and to “mov[e] American politics to the right.”

After explaining why the Clintons hate Don Imus, and how Media Matters has been collecting information on the controversial radio host for years just waiting for an opportunity to take him down, Perazzo addressed the unmistakable connection between this leftwing organization and the junior senator from New York:

Media Matters’ links to Hillary are at once intimate and multitudinous, and the organization’s devotion to her is nothing short of profound. In 1996 (eight years before Media Matters’ creation), the then-conservative David Brock was commissioned (with a $1 million advance) by the Simon & Schuster subsidiary Free Press to write a hard-hitting expose of Hillary. But the book, completed in 1997, turned out to be nothing more than a tepid, distinctly sympathetic account of the former First Lady’s life. That same year (1997), Brock publicly announced his political epiphany, unequivocally recanting his previous negative writings about the Clintons and embracing the liberal/Left cause. During this period, Brock developed a close relationship with Neel Lattimore, Senator Clinton’s openly gay press secretary and close confidante. Brock would eventually hire Lattimore as a director of “special projects” for Media Matters.

Brock’s affinity for Mrs. Clinton grew over time, and vice versa. According to Glenn Thrush of Newsday, Hillary “advised Brock on creating” Media Matters in 2004, “encouraging the creation of a liberal equivalent of the Media Research Center, a conservative group that has aggravated Democrats for decades.” Thrush reports that Hillary still “chats with [Brock] occasionally and thinks he provides a valuable service . . .” “For her part,” Thrush adds, “Clinton’s extended family of contributors, consultants and friends has played a pivotal role in helping Media Matters grow from a $3.5 million start-up in 2004 to its current $8.5 million budget.”

There was more in this September 7, 2006, Newsday article of note (emphasis added):

"David is immensely valuable to Hillary," says a wealthy Democrat with ties to Brock, speaking anonymously.
[…]
Brock's mediamatters.org Web site debunks attacks on all prominent Democrats and has been funded by donors with connections to many party leaders.Still, it's been particularly kind to Clinton. The site posts three to four articles per week chiding perceived Clinton bashers from Bill O'Reilly to Tucker Carlson to The New York Times. When Brock listed his 2005 accomplishments, he highlighted his point-by-point dissection of Ed Klein's error-strewn Clinton biography.
[…]

There are other Clinton connections. Media Matters' special projects director, C. Neel Lattimore, was Clinton's press secretary when she was first lady.And Brock is close to Bill Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta, founder of the powerhouse Democratic think tank Center for American Progress. Podesta, one of Hillary Clinton's top policy advisers, made room for Media Matters in the center's offices before Brock found permanent digs for the group.

But that’s not all. According to Perazzo, the Hillary connection to Media Matters goes much deeper:

Media Matters and Hillary Clinton are further linked by their respective relationships with three of the most influential leftist operatives in the world—George Soros, Morton Halperin, and John Podesta. All three of these men are intimately involved with a vital think tank called the Center for American Progress (CAP)—which, according to Cybercast News Service’s research, “was instrumental in getting Brock’s media group off the ground”; which helped launch Media Matters on May 3, 2004; and which maintains a tight bond with Brock’s organization to this day.

As NewsBusters reported in June, “the staff and Senior Fellows listing of this Center reads like a Clinton administration Who’s Who.” As Perazzo pointed out, it is directly connected to Media Matters and Soros:

CAP is heavily funded by the aforementioned billionaire financier George Soros, and in turn works closely with Media Matters to remove potential roadblocks (like Don Imus) from Hillary Clinton’s path to the White House. According to Bill O’Reilly, some of the money Soros gives to CAP eventually finds its way into the coffers of Media Matters, though Media Matters disputes this.

Soros in 2004 spent some $26 million trying, unsuccessfully, to defeat President Bush’s reelection bid, a task Soros called “the central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death.” He has likened Republicans generally, and the Bush administration in particular, to “the Nazi and communist regimes” in the sense that they are “all engaged in the politics of fear.” “Indeed,” he wrote in 2006, “the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries.” Soros elaborated on this theme at the January 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he told reporters: “America needs to . . . go through a certain de-Nazification process.” Today Soros remains committed to ousting the Nazi-like Republicans from the White House. And because Hillary Clinton appears to be the person most capable of making his dream a reality, Soros is heavily invested in abetting her quest for the presidency. He does this in part by funding the Center for American Progress, with the knowledge that CAP will work synergistically with pro-Hillary organizations like Media Matters. […]

Hillary’s ties to Brock’s organization are further cemented by the largesse of such donors to Media Matters as Susie Tompkins Buell (Hillary’s close ally and a co-founder of the fashion company Esprit) and James Hormel (a San Francisco philanthropist who narrowly missed being named ambassador to Luxembourg during the Clinton administration in the 1990s).

Is the picture becoming clearer? Hillary and her backers have created an advocacy network whose expressed goal is to take down all of her critics in the media.
In fact, after Imus was fired by NBC and CBS, Media Matters published a 6,000-word article entitled “It’s Not Just Imus,” listing other political enemies of the Clintons such as Glenn Beck, Neal Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Michael Smerconish, and John Gibson.

As Perazzo stated, “By eliminating such conservative voices from the airwaves, Media Matters could effectively insulate much of the American public from ever hearing about the negative traits and hidden agendas of Hillary Clinton, and thereby, in essence, ensure her ascendancy to the Oval Office.”

Well, last week, Media Matters went after Limbaugh and O’Reilly, and, sadly, many in the press bought their smears hook, line, and sinker without fully investigating what both hosts really said, and what the context of their statements were.

Maybe even more disgraceful, as press members parrot the cherry-picked reports from Media Matters, they are mute concerning the organization’s ties to a former president and current Democrat front-runner to win the White House in 2008.

Isn’t this the perfect story for muckraking, investigative journalism programs like “60 Minutes,” “Dateline,” and “20/20?”

And, as they receive information from this organization with clear ties to a leading political figure in our nation, shouldn’t media be somewhat cynical concerning what is coming from this group thereby feeling the need to thoroughly scrutinize its reports before sharing them with the citizenry?

Consider that Howard Kurtz on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday referred to Media Matters as a “liberal advocacy group.” If folks in the press are indeed aware that this is a leftwing shill, every report Media Matters publishes should be thoroughly researched and fact-checked before it is disseminated.

Failing this, media are simply acting as a conduit for propaganda from one presidential candidate to the public which is something that should be completely unacceptable to all Americans regardless of political leaning.

Links:
"SMEAR
More here.
MORE: Desperately seeking "Betray-us."
We noted here and here the phony attacks on Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly by "Media Matters," a Soros-financed cog in the Clinton machine.
San Francisco Democrats of 1984

Microscope Turns on Media Matters
MSNBC's Scarborough and Courtney Hazlett get it right!
Tom Harkin, Who Lied About His Service, Desecrates the Senate
Senator Harkin embarrasses himself and his family.

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A Dangerous Psychopath

That this man was allowed to hold the office of President of the United States for two terms is an abomination, on the scale of electing Caligula - we are truly fortunate to still have a stable republic, post Bubba...Rome survived Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula - we should not assume that temping fate will serve us better than she did Pax Romana...T

Haven’t you missed Bill Clinton? The above YouTube will remind you why.

Actually, much of the blame for the debased state of our modern politics rightly lies at Clinton’s feet. When ordinary people dream of being president, they don’t harbor visions of enacting a micro-agenda that focuses on minutiae like school uniforms, midnight basketball and drive-through deliveries (which Clinton often incorrectly labeled “drive-by deliveries”, a term that made absolutely no sense). For a purely political creature like Bill Clinton, it was all about having power. Doing something or anything with that power was a side thought.

In the YouTube above, Clinton conflates the attacks on General David Petraeus with the former POTUS’ fanciful reminisces of political attacks on John Kerry and Max Cleland. Normally, I question Bill Clinton’s sincerity any time his lips are moving, but in this clip he shows that little flash of indignant anger that indicates you’re getting a glimpse at the man’s core.

Of course he would see no difference between a couple of office-seekers and a man who is leading 160,000 American soldiers in combat. Everything for this man has always been about politics. The notion of a figure who transcends politics probably makes as much sense to Bill Clinton as the idea of a man who transcends gravity.

Bill Clinton may have been the master of the game, but his philosophical heirs are still at work at organizations like Moveon.org and the Daily Kos. They, too, view everything as political and couldn’t possibly understand why a Four Star General leading 160,000 troops in harm’s way shouldn’t be treated as a partisan enemy. It takes the political deftness of Bill Clinton to makes his rubbish remotely sellable, talents that the likes of Eli Pariser and Markos Moulitsas happily lack.

Return on Success?

The tide continues to turn. The phrase "Axis of Evil" - widely derided by the gilded elites - is turning out to be as accurate as the original "Axis" was. We defeated them at the cost of MILLIONS of lives. We have lost some 3,500 in Iraq in 6 years, which to the media and democrats today is synonymous with defeat! they are anti-American to the core, and Roosevelt or Lincoln would have had them imprisoned, without thinking twice.

We now have troops on Iran's western and eastern borders in some great force. Two legs of the Axis remain to be kicked out from under the stool - we'd better get on with it...T

For most of the last year, the dominant narrative in most media, and for most voters, has been that we are getting nowhere in Iraq and that the Democrats, after their victory in last November's elections, are going to get out of Iraq.

But events are not playing out that way. Last week, the Senate failed to pass an amendment that would have made it more difficult to rotate troops into Iraq -- and passed, by a 72-to-25 margin, a resolution denouncing the moveon.org ad that attacked "General Betray Us" for "cooking the books."

Polls show that the public approves of Petraeus' performance and endorses his recommendations for going forward with the surge -- the first margin of approval for the administration's course of action in a long time.

Petraeus argued convincingly that we are making real progress in Iraq, that the downward spiral of violence has been turned around and that the battle against al-Qaida in Iraq is meeting with success. George W. Bush, in a Roosevelt Room interview with columnists, made it plain that he is determined to provide Petraeus with the troops he needs, and the Democratic Congress has made it plain that it will not stop him.

To be sure, Petraeus has recommended reducing forces, starting in December, and going back to pre-surge levels next summer. But this is a far different thing from what the Democrats had in mind six months ago. And the results on the ground seem to be far different from what they expected.
True, some Democrats persist in saying that the aggressive surge strategy has made no difference, and large numbers of voters are not convinced that it has. But it is now possible that the added troops will, in Bush's phrase, "return on success." That's a sharp change from what has been the dominant narrative.

Another event that undermines that narrative took place on Sept. 6, but only began to be appreciated in Washington last week. That was the Israeli air attack on Syria. Israeli officials have said nothing in public about this (although opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu said he supported the action), and Bush flatly refused to comment in his press conference. But on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens speculated that "the least unlikely possibility" was that the target was a North Korean nuclear installation.

North Korean technicians were known to be in Syria, and the North Korean government protested the attack. By Friday, The Washington Post reported that "Israel's decision to attack Syria on Sept. 6, bombing a suspected nuclear site set up in apparent collaboration with North Korea, came after Israel shared intelligence with President Bush this summer indicating that North Korean nuclear personnel were in Syria, said U.S. government sources."

Bush has been mocked for calling Iraq, Iran and North Korea "the axis of evil." Suddenly that doesn't seem so far-fetched. Iran's ally Syria has apparently been in cahoots with faraway North Korea. And perhaps Iran has been, as well; perhaps this was part of the mullahs' efforts to get their hands on nuclear weapons.

The Syrian program may have been stopped by Israel's Sept. 6 air strike, just as Saddam Hussein's nuclear program was stopped by Israel's destruction of his Osirak reactor in 1981. That was condemned by just about everyone at the time, including the Reagan administration. But today almost every decent person is glad it happened.

The response to Petraeus and the emerging story about the Israeli air strike lead to two conclusions, both at odds with what has been the dominant narrative. It's a dangerous world. And we can make progress. Advocates of speedy withdrawal from Iraq talk as if there would be no bad consequences afterward, as we face no other threats in the world. But the possibility of a nuclear Iran is a real threat, one which Bush says he gives as much attention to as Iraq. The success so far of the surge strategy and the apparent success of the Israeli air strike indicate that there are things we can do to meet those threats.

The dominant narrative is that we are headed to defeat in Iraq, and Bush's political adversaries want him to acknowledge that. With stubbornness or steadfastness -- call it either one -- he has refused to do so and now has started to establish a different narrative, "return on success." Voters may come to understand that however delicious the Democrats find defeat, its consequences in a dangerous world would be devastating.
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A 'Realistic Chance' of Success

Amen - the tide is turning at last...T

As always, the inadvertent slip is the most telling. Discussing the performance of British troops, Gen. David Petraeus told Sen. Joe Biden of the Foreign Relations Committee that he'd be consulting with British colleagues in London on his way back "home." He had meant to say "Iraq," where he is now on his third tour of duty. Is there any other actor in Washington's Iraq war drama -- from Harry Reid to the Joint Chiefs -- who could have made such a substitution? Anyone who not only knows Iraq the way Petraeus does but feels it in all its gravity and complexity?

When asked about Shiite militia domination of southern Iraq, Petraeus patiently went through the four provinces, one by one, displaying a degree of knowledge of the local players, terrain and balance of power that no one in Washington -- and few in Iraq -- could match.

When Biden thought he had a gotcha -- contradictions between Petraeus's report on Iraqi violence and the less favorable one by the Government Accountability Office -- Petraeus calmly pointed out that the GAO had to cut its data-gathering five weeks short to meet reporting requirements to Congress. And since those most recent five weeks had been particularly productive for the coalition, the GAO numbers were not only outdated but misleading.

For all the attempts by Democrats and the antiwar movement to discredit Petraeus, he won the congressional confrontation hands down. He demonstrated enough military progress from his new counterinsurgency strategy to conclude: "I believe we have a realistic chance of achieving our objectives in Iraq."

The American people are not antiwar. They are anti-losing. Which means they are also anti-drift. Adrift is where we were during most of 2006 -- the annus horribilis initiated by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's bringing down the Golden Mosque in Samarra -- until the new counterinsurgency strategy of 2007 (the "surge") reversed the trajectory of the war.

It was being lost both in Iraq and at home. On the home front, Petraeus deftly deflated the rush to withdrawal that appeared poised to acquire irresistible momentum this summer. First, by demonstrating real and irrefutable territorial gains on the ground. Second, by proposing minor immediate withdrawals to be followed by fully liquidating the "surge" by next summer. Those withdrawals should be enough to hold the wobbly Republican senators. And perhaps even more important, the Pentagon brass.

The service chiefs no longer fight wars. That's now left to theater commanders such as Petraeus. The chiefs' job is to raise armies -- to recruit, train, equip and manage. Petraeus's job is to use their armies to win wars. The chiefs are quite reasonably concerned about the enormous strain put on their worldwide forces by the tempo of operations in Iraq. Petraeus's withdrawal recommendations have prevented a revolt of the generals.

Petraeus's achievement is no sleight of hand. If he had not produced real, demonstrable progress -- reported by many independent observers, including liberal Democrats, even before he came back home (i.e., the United States) -- his appearance before Congress would have swayed no one.

His testimony, steady and forthright, bought him the time to achieve his "realistic chance" of success. Not the unified, democratic Iraq we had hoped for the day Saddam Hussein's statue came down, but a radically decentralized Iraq with enough regional autonomy and self-sufficiency to produce a tolerable stalemated coexistence between contending forces.

That's for the longer term and still quite problematic. In the shorter term, however, there is a realistic chance of achieving a separate success that, within the context of Iraq, is of a second order but in the global context is of the highest order -- the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Having poisoned one country and been expelled from it (Afghanistan), al-Qaeda seized upon post-Hussein instability to establish itself in the very heart of the Arab Middle East -- Sunni Iraq. Yet now, in front of all the world, Iraq's Sunnis are, to use the biblical phrase, vomiting out al-Qaeda. This is a defeat and humiliation in the extreme -- an Arab Muslim population rejecting al-Qaeda so violently that it allies itself in battle with the infidel, the foreigner, the occupier.

Just carrying this battle to its successful conclusion -- independent of its larger effect of helping stabilize Iraq -- is justification enough for the surge. The turning of Sunni Iraq against al-Qaeda is a signal event in the war on terrorism. Petraeus's plan is to be allowed to see it through.
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Democrats' disgrace

Amen brothers and sisters! Tony Blankley nails it here. I can never get enough Patton quotes. Remember "I'd rather face a German division in front of me than a French one behind"?
This one's for you Michael Kelly - God rest your soul...T
"To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of evil instead of the vanquishing of evil." --Michael Kelly

Sometimes we can better understand where we are politically from afar than from within. Consider this assessment from Europe's biggest and Germany's most influential magazine, Der Spiegel, this week:

"The wind has shifted in Washington. America, not just its president, is at war. The Democrats are still critical of the failed Iraq campaign, but they are no longer opposed to the 'War on Terror' in general. It has been accepted, and not just as a metaphor... Ninety two percent of Americans are opposed to an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a majority doesn't want to see the US's special detention camp at Guantanamo Bay closed. At the moment, the American electorate's biggest criticism of Bush is that he has not been aggressive enough in pursuing terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

"Indeed, when voters hit the ballot box in November 2008, they will be looking for more than just a candidate charismatic and clever enough to lead the country politically. They will also ask themselves which of the candidates is sufficiently tough, crafty and brutal to win the multi-front war that the Bush administration has begun.

"Many Americans now despise Bush [because of Iraq]. Nevertheless, Americans are still loathe to admit defeat. This is precisely what distinguishes Europeans from Americans... The Americans favor the power of force, even in its crudest form, which explains why the U.S. military might is so superior to that of all other nations." (By Gabor Steingart. Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.)

We see evidence that the Democrats are beginning to appreciate the truth of the above description. The New York Times has suddenly started counseling caution about any sudden departure from Iraq. Sen. Barack Obama's steroid-enhanced rhetoric now has him calling — Rambo-like — for possible pre-emptive war against Pakistan. Sen. Hillary Clinton announces that she might use nuclear weapons against terrorists (I hope she doesn't find the terrorists in New York, where one of my sons lives, or London, my hometown). The Democratic congressional leaders quickly passed President Bush's requested FISA electronic intercepts authority.

The Democrats, after spending the winter, spring and early summer frantically calling for getting out of Iraq as fast as their little feet can carry them, are now, as autumn approaches, demonstrating their Olympic-class back-pedaling skills.

By winter (with the complicity of the drive-by media hat tip to Rush Limbaugh) the Democrats hope to expunge the historic record of their failure of war nerve this spring. This is the moment for Republicans from the president, to the candidates for president, to the incumbents and challengers for offices all the way down to dog catcher (and especially dog catcher) to remind the public of the springtime Democratic Party defeatism and lost nerve.

They should be inspired to follow the immortal advice of Gen. Patton to his troops regarding what they should do to the Nazi enemy: "We are going to hold them by the nose and kick them in the ass... we are going to go through them like crap through a goose." Of course, the Democrats are only the domestic opposition, not the enemy. In American politics we have no American enemies — only philosophical opponents — I mean that.

The leadership of the Democratic Party has, by its public words this spring, disgraced themselves for a generation. Republicans have the right — and the duty — to engrave in the public mind the springtime Democratic perfidy and cowardice in the face of the enemy.

This spring and early summer: Sen. Harry Reid said the war is lost; Gov. Bill Richardson said that on his first day in the Oval Office he would order our troops to leave Iraq immediately (even if it meant throwing down their weapons on the way out); Hillary bragged that if Mr. Bush doesn't end the war, she would do so immediately upon her arriving in the Oval Office (God preserve us); and Mr. Obama took pride of place in his adamant opposition to, and call for immediate departure from, the Iraq war.

Gen. Patton also observed that "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser." That is as true today as it was six decades ago. (This is the great misreading of the American public by the current Democratic Party. We Americans are only sentimental about dogs — we have three in our family — not about human losers. We love kick-ass football players — unless they hurt a dog, and then we righteously send them to hell, where they belong).

The public must not be permitted to forget these cowardly public statements by the Democrats. It is the job of the Republicans this fall and winter to remorselessly and repeatedly remind the public of what the Democrats were saying this spring. In that disgrace lies the potential for a well-deserved Democratic Party defeat in November 2008.
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A bad case of malignant narcissism

So, by now you've all heard that NASA has admitted that the record high temperatures of the 90's were, well, not record setting, and, well, not that hot after all...oh you haven't heard? Stop watching the MSM, ladies and gentlemen. These agencies are paid taxpayer funds to produce either, A: there IS NO evidence of global warming, meaning the study needs no further funding, or, B: there IS evidence of said, which means endless funding to continue research. You do the math. As we were taught in Psych 101, this is most certainly NOT a double blind study. Please take a few moments at your leisure and use the "Search This Blog" feature (left column, about 1/3 of the way down the page) for many more articles and scientific white papers on climate change, and it's history..T

Warm-mongers and cheeseburger imperialists

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.

Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

So why is 1998 no longer America's record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA's handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an "oversight" that would be corrected in the next "data refresh." The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.

Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he's not even American: He's Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won't do, even when they're federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings – albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don't shine.

One is tempted to explain the error with old the computer expert's cry: That's not a bug, it's a feature. To maintain public hysteria, it's necessary for the warm-mongers to be able to demonstrate that something is happening now. Or as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram put it at the end of 1998:

"It's December, and you're still mowing the lawn. You can't put up the Christmas lights because you're afraid the sweat pouring off your face will short out the connections. Your honeysuckle vines are blooming. Mosquitoes are hovering at your back door.

"Hot enough for you?"

It's not the same if you replace "Hot enough for you?" with "Yes, it's time to relive sepia-hued memories from grandpa's Dust Bowl childhood."
Yet the fakery wouldn't be so effective if there weren't so many takers for it. Why is that?

In my book, still available at all good bookstores (you can find it propping up the wonky rear leg of the display table for Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"), I try to answer this question by way of some celebrated remarks by the acclaimed British novelist Margaret Drabble, speaking just after the liberation of Iraq. Ms Drabble said:
"I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win."

That's an interesting list of grievances. If you lived in Poland in the 1930s, you weren't worried about the Soviets' taste in soft drinks or sentimental Third Reich pop culture. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Chad or some such. But because it's the world's first nonimperial superpower the world has had to concoct a thesis that America is a threat not merely to this or that nation state but to the entire planet, and not because of conventional great-power designs but because – even scarier – of its "consumption," its very way of life. Those Cokes and cheeseburgers detested by discriminating London novelists are devastating the planet in ways that straightforward genocidal conquerors like Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of. The construct of this fantasy is very revealing about how unthreatening America is.

And, when the cheeseburger imperialists are roused to real if somewhat fitful warmongering, that's no reason for the self-loathing to stop. The New Republic recently published a "Baghdad Diary" by one "Scott Thomas," who turned out to be Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp. It featured three anecdotes of American soldiering: the deliberate killing of domestic dogs by the driver of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle; a child's skull worn by a U.S. serviceman as a fashion accessory; and the public abuse of a woman to her face, a half-melted face disfigured by an IED. In that last anecdote, the abusive soldier was the author himself, citing it as evidence of how the Iraq war has degraded and dehumanized everyone.

According to the Weekly Standard, army investigators say Pvt. Beauchamp has now signed a statement recanting his lurid anecdotes. And even the New Republic's editors concede the IED-victim mockery took place in Kuwait, before Pvt. Beauchamp ever got to Iraq.

They don't seem to realize this destroys the entire premise of the piece, which is meant to be about the dehumanization of soldiers in combat. Pvt. Beauchamp came pre-dehumanized. Indeed, he was writing Iraq atrocity fantasies on his blog back in Germany. It might be truer to say he was "dehumanized" by American media coverage. In this, he joins an ever lengthening list of peddlers of fake atrocities, such as Jesse MacBeth, an Army Ranger who claimed to have slaughtered hundreds of civilians in a mosque. He turned out to be neither an Army Ranger nor a mass murderer.

There are many honorable reasons to oppose the Iraq war, but believing that our troops are sick monsters is not one of them. The sickness is the willingness of so many citizens of the most benign hegemon in history to believe they must be.

As Pogo said, way back in the 1971 Earth Day edition of a then-famous comic strip, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Even when we don't do anything: In the post-imperial age, powerful nations no longer have to invade and kill. Simply by driving a Chevy Suburban, we can make the oceans rise and wipe the distant Maldive Islands off the face of the Earth. This is a kind of malignant narcissism so ingrained it's now taught in our grade schools. Which may be why, even when the New Republic's diarist goes to Iraq and meets the real enemy, he still assumes it's us.
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Obama Vespucci?

Listen, Kos, I'm in charge here, ok? please? oh don't tell Cindy Sheehan!

Perceptions of Iraq War Are Starting to Shift

"If opinion continues to shift (the way it is), if others come to see things as O'Hanlon and Pollack have, Democrats could find themselves trapped between a base that wants retreat and defeat, and a majority that wants victory."

These remarks, by liberal think tanks and former anti-war generals, have the left wing fanatics caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Victory for the USA means oblivion for the democrats...T


It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when The New York Times printed an opinion article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq.

Yes, progress. O'Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- Pollack even wrote a book urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein -- but they have sharply criticized military operations there in the ensuing years.

"As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq," they wrote, "we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory,' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."

Their bottom line: "There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008."

That's not what almost all their fellow Democrats in Congress want to hear. Freshman Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas, who unseated Republican Jim Ryun last fall, bolted from a hearing room when retired Gen. Jack Keane described positive developments in Iraq. When she came back, she explained: "But let me first just say that the description of Iraq as in some way or another that it's a place that I might take the family for a vacation -- things are going so well -- those kinds of comments will in fact show up in the media and further divide this country, instead of saying, here's the reality of the problem. And people, we have to come together and deal with the reality of this issue."

But reality can change -- and in war it often does. For George W. Bush and his leading advisers, the reality of Iraq in June 2003 was that we had won a major military victory and that any postwar messiness was not a big problem. We'd put a proconsul in for a year, set up elections and install an Iraqi government, train Iraqi soldiers and police, and restrict our troops to a light footprint. But that reality changed, into full-fledged sectarian warfare, after al-Qaida bombed the Shiite mosque in Samarra in February 2006.

Bush and his military commanders acted as if that reality hadn't changed, until the voters weighed in last November. Then, Bush made changes, installing new commanders and ordering a surge -- an increase in troops, and a more forward strategy of confronting and cleaning out al-Qaida terrorists. And the reality apparently has once again changed.

It can be argued that the surge will prove insufficient to produce the "sustainable stability" that O'Hanlon and Pollack see as a possible result. Serious military experts have argued that we still don't have enough troops or that we won't be able to keep enough troops in place long enough -- current force rotations indicate a net drawdown of troops next spring. And certainly there is room to make the argument that Bush should have acted sooner, as the results of the Samarra bombing became apparent months before the voters' wakeup call.

But it is also reasonably clear that Boyda's "reality of this issue" -- that our effort in Iraq has definitively and finally failed so clearly that there should be no further discussion -- may no longer be operative. That, instead of accepting defeat and inviting chaos, we may be able to achieve a significant measure of success.

Wars don't stand still. In June 1942, the House of Commons debated a resolution of no confidence in Winston Churchill's government. Four months later came the war-changing victory at El Alamein.
Gen. David Petraeus, the author of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual and the commander in Iraq, is scheduled to report on the surge in mid-September. The prospect of an even partially positive report has sent chills up the spines of Democratic leaders in Congress. That, says House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, would be "a real big problem for us."

The Democratic base has been furious that Democrats in Congress haven't pulled the plug on the war already, and Democratic strategists have been anticipating big electoral gains from military defeat. But if the course of the war can change, so can public opinion. A couple of recent polls showed increased support for the decision to go to war and belief that the surge is working. If opinion continues to shift that way, if others come to see things as O'Hanlon and Pollack have, Democrats could find themselves trapped between a base that wants retreat and defeat, and a majority that wants victory.
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