Why do "they" hate us?

I'll go even farther than Barone: They hate everything about America. They hate capitalism, they hate freedom of thought (they want to tell us want to think, of course), they hate our prosperity...because they hate themselves..it's really that simple, and that complex...this NYT fiasco is a rare example of them getting caught red-handed, fleeing the scene with a ladies handbag in tow...T

Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society.

No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.

Last December, the Times ran a story revealing that the National Security Agency was conducting electronic surveillance of calls from suspected al-Qaida terrorists overseas to persons in the United States. This was allegedly a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. But in fact the president has, under his war powers, the right to order surveillance of our enemies abroad. And it makes no sense to hang up when those enemies call someone in the United States -- rather the contrary. If the government is going to protect us from those who wish to do us grievous harm -- and after Sept. 11 no one can doubt there are many such persons -- then it should try to track them down as thoroughly as possible.

Little wonder that President Bush called in Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and top editor Bill Keller, and asked them not to run the story. But the Times went ahead and published it anyway. Now, thanks to The New York Times, al-Qaida terrorists are aware that their phone calls can be monitored, and presumably have taken precautions.

Last Friday, the Times did it again, printing a story revealing the existence of U.S. government monitoring of financial transactions routed through the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which routes about $6 trillion a day in electronic money transfers around the world. The monitoring is conducted by the CIA and supervised by the Treasury Department. An independent auditing firm has been hired to make sure only terrorist-related transactions are targeted.

Members of Congress were briefed on the program, and it does not seem to violate any law, at least any that the Times could identify. And it has been effective. As the Times reporters admit, it helped to locate the mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombing in Thailand and a Brooklyn man convicted on charges of laundering a $200,000 payment to al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan.

Once again, Bush administration officials asked the Times not to publish the story. Once again, the Times went ahead anyway. "We have listened closely to the administration's arguments for withholding this information, and given them the most serious and respectful consideration," Bill Keller is quoted as saying. It's interesting to note that he feels obliged to report he and his colleagues weren't smirking or cracking jokes. "We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

This was presumably the view as well of the "nearly 20 current and former government officials and industry executives" who were apparently the sources for the story.

But who elected them to make these decisions? Publication of the Times' December and June stories appears to violate provisions of the broadly written, but until recently, seldom enforced provisions of the Espionage Act. Commentary's Gabriel Schoenfeld has argued that the Times can and probably should be prosecuted.

The counterargument is that it is a dangerous business for the government to prosecute the press. But it certainly is in order to prosecute government officials who have abused their trust by disclosing secrets, especially when those disclosures have reduced the government's ability to keep us safe. And pursuit of those charges would probably require reporters to disclose the names of those sources. As the Times found out in the Judith Miller case, reporters who refuse to answer such questions can go to jail.

Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? They say that these surveillance programs are subject to abuse, but give no reason to believe that this concern is anything but theoretical. We have a press that is at war with an administration, while our country is at war against merciless enemies. The Times is acting like an adolescent kicking the shins of its parents, hoping to make them hurt while confident of remaining safe under their roof. But how safe will we remain when our protection depends on the Times?
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Why the Democrats May Lose the 2008 Election

This has always been my prediction as well, and I haven't been wrong since 98. We are doing much better than the drive-by-media declare ..(see next article!)....T
Will President Bush's current unpopularity translate into a Democratic recapture of either the House or Senate this fall — or a victory in the 2008 presidential election?

Probably not.

Despite widespread unhappiness with the Republicans, it is hard to envision a majority party run by Howard Dean, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Why?

All sorts of apparent and not-so-apparent reasons. First, recent events and trends have complicated Democrats' talking points about George W. Bush's purported failings.

The so-called "jobless" recovery has seen low unemployment rates comparable to the Clinton boom years.

Last September, many people blamed what they viewed as a stingy federal government for the chaos following Hurricane Katrina. But now we learn individuals' fraudulent claims and spending accounted for $1.4 billion in federal largess. Too much was apparently thrown around from big government too generously, rather than too little, too slowly.

Karl Rove was supposedly going to be "frog-marched" out of the White House in cuffs for a role in outing CIA agent Valerie Plame. Instead, the special prosecutor recently found no evidence that he was involved in any wrongdoing.

And then there's Iraq . The recent killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the establishment of a complete Iraqi democratic Cabinet will not ensure a quick victory, as we see from the recent slaughter of American captive soldiers. But both events still weaken the liberal clamor that the American effort at birthing democracy is doomed in Iraq . Calling for a deadline to leave, as Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Ma.) advocate, is not so compelling when the current policy is based on training the growing Iraqi security forces so that American troops can come home as soon as possible.

Thus, looking ahead to the elections, there is little that the Democrats will be able to capitalize on.

Take the budget deficit. Total federal annual revenues have increased despite, or because of, the tax cuts. Yet at the same time budget expenditures in the first Bush term grew at a much faster annual rate than during Bill Clinton's administration. So the time-honored remedy for the shortfall calls for cuts and a more conservative budget cruncher, hardly a liberal forte.

Even in an area like illegal immigration where Bush is getting hammered by his own party, the Democrats aren't in good shape. Their similar support for amnesty and guest workers gives them the same Bush negatives on those issues. But they suffer the additional burden of apparent laxity on open borders.

Meanwhile, the Democrats face a more fundamental, existential problem. The addition of China and India to the world capitalist system has brought well over a billion workers into the global marketplace. The planet is now flooded with cheap consumer goods — at precisely the time the U.S. economy keeps creating national wealth at a rapid clip.

The result is that while there may be more inequality than ever before in the no-holds-barred world mart, the middle class and poor in the U.S. have access to "things" — TVs, sound systems, clothes, cars — undreamed of in the past. We are now in the age of MTV and mass conspicuous consumption, not of the grapes of wrath. American class warfare can no longer be defined by the Democratic Party as an elemental need for a 40-hour workweek, unemployment and disability insurance, or Social Security.

Unfortunately, the liberal debate has devolved to why one person has more opportunity for leisure and even nicer things than others do. A sort of envy rather than hunger more often fuels the gripe — and that should require a subtle Democratic acknowledgment that things continue to improve for everyone.

Finally, in the past, savvy Democrats understood the need for a conservative package for such liberal contents. To win the popular vote in presidential races, the formula was to nominate a Southern governor or senator — as in 1964, 1976, 1992, 1996 and 2000 — and then hope either for a Republican scandal such as Watergate or Iran-Contra, or a populist third-party conservative like Ross Perot.

In contrast, recently any time the liberal base got its wish and nominated a Northern progressive — 1968, 1972, 1984, 1988 or 2004 — the party lost the presidency. So far even Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Katrina and Haditha have not equated to past national scandals; nor will there likely be a prairie-fire independent to draw votes away from the Republicans.

Yes, much of the public is grumpy at high gas prices. It does not like the costs in Iraq and continuing budget deficits. And people worry about unchecked illegal immigration and dangers on the horizon, from Iran to North Korea . But when Americans get inside the voting booth, they probably will think the envisioned Democratic remedy is worse than the current perceived Republican disease.
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Betting on Defeat? It’s far from a safe bet

As I read this article, breathlessly, I thought aloud, "yeah!, that's exactly how I feel! That's exactly what I think!". This is the classic interpretation of why we are in Iraq, why we went, and why it matters to the future history of the world. This is why GW will occupy a chapter in the history books, not an endnote (as in "click here for "what is a Lewinski")...T

Lately, it has become popular to recant on Iraq. When 2,500 Americans are lost, and when the improvised explosive device monopolizes the war coverage, it is easy to see why — especially with elections coming up in November, and presidential primaries not long after.

Pundits now daily equivocate in their understandable exasperation at the apparent lack of quantifiable progress. The ranks of public supporters have thinned as final victory seems elusive. It is hard to find any consistent public advocates of the American effort in Iraq other than the editors and writers here at National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, Norman Podhoretz, and a very few principled others.

But for all the despair, note all the problems for those who have triangulated throughout this war.

First, those who undergo the opportune conversion often fall prey to disingenuousness. Take John Kerry’s recent repudiation of his earlier vote for the war in Iraq. To cheers of Democratic activists, he now laments, “We were misled.”

Misled?

Putting aside the question of weapons of mass destruction and the use of the royal “we,” was the senator suggesting that Iraq did not violate the 1991 armistice accords?

Or that Saddam Hussein did not really gas and murder his own people?

Perhaps he was “misled” into thinking Iraqi agents did not really plan to murder former President George Bush?

Or postfacto have we learned that Saddam did not really shield terrorists?

Apparently the Iraqi regime neither violated U.N. accords nor shot at American planes in the no-fly zones.

Senator Kerry, at least if I remember correctly, voted for the joint congressional resolution of October 11, 2002, authorizing a war against Iraq, on the basis of all these and several other causus belli, well apart from fear of WMDs.

Second, those with a shifting position on the war sometimes cannot keep up with a war that is shifting itself, where things change hourly. And when one has no consistent or principled position, the 24-hour battlefield usually proves a fickle barometer by which to exude military wisdom.

Even as critics were equating Haditha with My Lai, al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda mass murderer in Iraq, was caught and killed. And what was the reaction of the stunned antiwar pundit or politician? Either we heard that there was impropriety involved in killing such a demon, or the former fugitive who was once supposedly proof of our ineptness suddenly was reinvented as having been irrelevant all along.

The Iraqi army — well over 250,000 strong — is growing, and the much smaller American force (about 130,000) is shrinking. How do you call for a deadline for withdrawal when Iraqization was always predicated on withdrawal only after there was no Iraqi dependence on a large, static American force?

After lamenting that the Iraqi government is a mess, we now see a tough prime minister and the selection of his cabinet completed. So it is not easy to offer somber platitudes of defeat when 400,000 coalition and Iraqi troops are daily fighting on the center stage of the war against Islamic terrorism. Someone from Mars might wonder what exactly were the conditions under which a quarter-million Muslim Arabs in Iraq alone went to war against Islamic radicalism.

Third, there is a fine line to be drawn between legitimate criticism of a war that is supposedly not worth American blood and treasure, and general slander of the United States and its military. Yet much of the Left’s rhetoric was not merely anti-Bush, but in its pessimism devolved into de facto anti-Americanism.

Senator Durbin compared Guantanamo Bay to the worst excesses of the Nazis. Senator Kennedy suggested that Abu Ghraib, where thousands perished under Saddam Hussein, had simply “reopened under new management: U.S. management.” Democratic-party chairman Howard Dean confidently asserted that the Iraq war was not winnable. John Kerry in his youth alleged that Americans were like Genghis Khan in their savagery; in his golden years, he once again insists that we are “terrorizing” Iraqi civilians. With friends like these, what war critic needs enemies? Americans can take disapproval that we are not fighting “smart,” but they resent the notion that we are somehow downright evil.

Fourth, the mainstream media is now discredited on Iraq, and their drumbeat of doom and gloom is starting to rile more than pleases the public. Aside from the bias that counts always our losses and rarely our successes, we are sick and tired of manipulations like the lies about flushed Korans, forged memos, and the rush to judgment on Haditha. Most weary Americans want at least a moment to savor the death of a mass-murdering Zarqawi, without having to lament that he might have been saved by quicker medical intervention.

Fifth, the historical assessment of Iraq is still undetermined, despite the pontification of former supporters who think they gain greater absolution the more vehemently they trash a war they once advocated.

The three-week effort to remove Saddam Hussein was a landmark success. The subsequent three-year occupation in his place has been messy, costly, and unpopular. But the result of the third and final stage that Iraq has evolved into — an existential fight between Iraqi democracy and al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism — is still uncertain. If we draw the terrorists out, defeat them in the heart of the ancient caliphate, and win the allegiance of enough democratic Iraqis to crush the Islamicists, then our military has won a far greater victory than the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Sixth, note how critics now rarely offer alternative scenarios. All the old gripes such as the paucity of body armor or thin-skinned humvees have withered away. The Iraqi elected government is sympathetic and earnest, so demonizing them ultimately translates into something like “Cut these guys lose; they weren’t worth the effort.” Yes, the American people want out of Iraq, but on terms that preserve the democracy that we paid so dearly to foster.

Even the one legitimate criticism that we were too slow in turning over control to the Iraqis, and that the Bremmer interregnum had too high a public profile, is now largely moot, as Ambassador Khalilzad and Gen. Casey are in the shadows, giving all the credit to the very public Iraqis and taking most of the blame for the bad news.

So we are nearing the denouement of the Iraq war, where we wanted to be all along: in support of a full-fledged and democratically elected government that will either win or lose its own struggle.

Seventh, the old twin charges — no link between al Qaeda and Saddam, no WMDs — are also becoming largely irrelevant or proving untrue. It must have been difficult for Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, in their coverage of the death of Zarqawi, to admit that he had been active in Iraq well before the end of Saddam Hussein, along with a mishmash of old killers from Abu Nidal to Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi American who helped plan the first World Trade Center bombing.

In addition, most abroad were convinced before the war that the CIA was right in its pre-war assessments. The publication of the Iraqi archives points to a real, not a phantom and former, WMD capability — in line with efforts elsewhere in the Islamic world, from Iran to Libya, to reclaim something akin to the old Soviet deterrent.

The costs in Iraq have been high and the losses tragic. But nothing in the past three years has convinced me otherwise than that:


1. in a post-September-11 world Saddam had to be removed on ethical and strategic grounds;

2. the insurgency, though unexpected in its intensity, could be put down by a U.S. military that would react and evolve more quickly than the terrorists to changing conditions on the ground;

3. our mistakes, though several and undeniable, are tragically the stuff of war, and so far have not proved to be irreversible or beyond what we experienced in any of our past efforts;

4. the maligned secretary of Defense was right about troop levels and the plan for Iraqization — although demonized for trying to transform the very nature of the American military in the midst of a war;

5. we are engaged in the great humanitarian effort of the age, as “one person, one vote” has brought to the perennially downtrodden Arab Shiites a real chance at equality;

6. the best method of winning this global struggle against fascistic Islamic terrorism remains fostering in the Middle East a third democratic alternative between autocracy and theocracy that alone can deal with the modern world.


Once a democratically elected Iraqi government emerged, and a national army was trained, the only way we could lose this war was to forfeit it at home, through the influence of an adroit, loud minority of critics that for either base or misguided reasons really does wish us to lose. They really do.
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Vietnam, Watergate and Rove

What is bad for America, is good for the present day Democratic party. Conversely, what is good for America reinforces the GOP's poll numbers. I have watched these people my entire life, and I know that Vietnam is their religion, and Watergate is their crucible. Barone just opines on the situation, as he sees it...but you can see that he views the big picture here...The libs are in full Vietnam/Watergate mode, and it will blow up in their collective face, this November.....T
It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. First, the Democrats failed to win a breakthrough victory in the California 50th District special election--a breakthrough that would have summoned up memories of Democrats winning Gerald Ford's old congressional district in a special election in 1974. Instead the Democratic nominee got 45% of the vote, just 1% more than John Kerry did in the district in 2004.
Second, U.S. forces with a precision air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on the same day that Iraqis finished forming a government. Zarqawi will not be available to gloat over American setbacks or our allies' defeat, as the leaders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did.
Third, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek an indictment of Karl Rove. The leftward blogosphere had Mr. Rove pegged for the role of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Theories were spun about plea bargains that would implicate Vice President Dick Cheney. Talk of impeachment was in the air. But it turns out that history doesn't repeat itself. George W. Bush, whether you like it or not, is not a second Richard Nixon.

It is hard in retrospect to understand why the left put so much psychic energy into the notion that Mr. Rove would be indicted. He certainly was an important target. No one in American history has been as powerful an aide to a president, both on politics and on public policy, as Karl Rove. Only Robert Kennedy in his brother's administration and Hamilton Jordan in Jimmy Carter's come close, and neither was as involved in electoral politics as Mr. Rove has been.

Still, it was clear early on that the likelihood that Mr. Rove violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was near zero. Under the law, the agent whose name was disclosed would have had to have served overseas within the preceding five years (Valerie Plame, according to her husband's book, had been stationed in the U.S. since 1997), and Mr. Rove would have had to know that she was undercover (not very likely). The left enjoyed raising an issue on which, for once, it could charge that a Republican administration had undermined national security. But that rang hollow when the left gleefully seized on the New York Times' disclosure of NSA surveillance of phone calls from suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad to persons in the U.S.

In all this a key role was played by the press. Cries went up early for the appointment of a special prosecutor: Patrick Fitzgerald would be another Archibald Cox or Leon Jaworski. Eager to bring down another Republican administration, the editorialists of the New York Times evidently failed to realize that the case could not be pursued without asking reporters to reveal the names of sources who had been promised confidentiality. America's newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. But this time it was not Republican administration officials who went to prison. It was Judith Miller, then of the New York Times itself.

Interestingly, Bob Woodward himself contradicted Mr. Fitzgerald's statement, made the day that he announced the one indictment he has obtained, of former vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby, that Mr. Libby was the first to disclose Ms. Plame's name to a reporter. The press reaction was to turn on Mr. Woodward, who has been covering this administration as a new story rather than as a reprise of Vietnam and Watergate.

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the "mainstream media" has been plunging. There's also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?
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Fitzmas in June Ruined for Democrats

In the immortal words of the master himself.........T
"I've been alive 55 years. I've been paying attention to politics probably since I was 12, and I'm being honest with you people. I have never seen -- even after Watergate, I have never seen -- a political party so disengaged from what is real. I have never seen a party with supporters, a major political party, with supporters as dense, as stupid, as dilapidated, as pathetic as those who make up what are now called the future, the Democratic Party.

This party once ruled this country almost as royalty, folks. The Democratic Party had an iron fist, grip, on everything in this country, and I know what's happened. I mean, I don't want to bother you with boring explanations again, but they have now descended and faded away into a collection of people who may be clinically insane because of their inability to grasp what had happened. They had the bowl of cherries for so long, they had the Holy Grail. They owned everything. It was their country to do with whatever they wanted -- and now it's not, and with each passing day, that reality hits them, broadsides them and they simply have no mechanism to deal with it." Click here for full article

Media’s Conveniently Changing View of Zarqawi

The MSM/Drive-by gang has long since dropped all pretense of objectivity. Now they don't even try, deciding instead to launch wave after wave of attacks on their political opponents (republicans all) on the evening news, and in the pages of the New York Times. Voters are noticing, as witnessed in the previous column..................T
If Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and all of al Qaeda’s leaders in Iraq and throughout the world laid down their arms and surrendered to American forces, would the media report it as good news?

Judging from the press’s reaction to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq by the American military last week, the answer appears to be no.

In fact, this tepid response to the death of the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq – a man who has at times in the past couple of years been depicted by the press as more vital to this terrorist network than the currently in-hiding bin Laden – suggests quite disturbingly that America’s media are fighting a different war than America’s soldiers.

According to NewsBusters, CNN’s senior editor for Arab affairs Octavia Nasr said the following about Zarqawi’s death on “American Morning” Thursday:

“Some people say it will enrage the insurgency, others say it will hurt it pretty bad. But if you think about the different groups in Iraq, you have to think that Zarqawi’s death is not going to be a big deal for them.”

However, CNN didn’t always feel that Zarqawi’s death or capture would be so inconsequential. Just days after Saddam Hussein was found in his spider hole, Paula Zahn brought CNN national correspondent Mike Boettcher on to discuss a new threat in Iraq. Zahn began the December 15, 2003 segment:

“The capture of Saddam Hussein may lead to renewed attention on the search for Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, and next to bin Laden, there is one man emerging as a major threat. He is believed to be the leader of a group much like al Qaeda, and the U.S. wants to catch him before he strikes again.”

Boettcher entered the discussion:

“The reward for his capture is only a fifth of that offered for Saddam Hussein, $5 million to Saddam’s $25 million, but abu-Mus’ab al- Zarqawi, say Middle East intelligence analysts, is emerging as the most dangerous terrorist conducting operations in Iraq, the surrounding region, and perhaps the world.”

Subsequent to this report, Zarqawi’s reward was raised to $25 million, meaning that the importance of his capture increased fivefold. Mysteriously, CNN didn’t see it that way, as in its view, the death of what it once described as “the most dangerous terrorist” in “perhaps the world” somehow became “no big deal.”

At roughly the same time as Nasr was downplaying Zarqawi’s death on CNN, ABC’s Diane Sawyer invited perennial Bush-basher Richard Clarke on “Good Morning America” to solicit his opinion on the subject. As reported by NewsBusters, Sawyer asked,
“[Is] it any safer in Iraq and will the war end any sooner?”

Clarke responded:

“Well, unfortunately the answer is no. This man was a terrible man. He was a symbol of terrorism. He was the face of terrorism, the only real name we knew of an insurgent leader in Iraq. But he commanded only a few hundred people out of tens of thousands involved in the insurgency. And so, unfortunately for the loved ones of troops over in Iraq, this is not going to mean a big difference.”
Sawyer incredulously concluded the segment:

“So for overall terrorism against the U.S., it’s, again, not a major effect.”

Yet, on November 21, 2005, Sawyer and the Good Morning America team weren’t so blasé about capturing or killing Zarqawi. Quite the contrary, Sawyer began her report that morning:

“Right now intelligence officials are pouring over information trying to decide if it’s possible that public enemy number one in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, has, in fact, been killed over the weekend. ABC’s chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross tells us what he learned.”
Ross answered:

“If it’s true it’d be major victory for the US in Iraq.”

This raises a rather obvious question: how could what would have been a “major victory” if it had occurred in November 2005 not have “a major effect” when it actually transpires less than seven months later?

Regardless of the answer, it wasn’t just the morning shows experiencing a convenient change of heart towards Zarqawi. A drastically similar conversion occurred on the CBS Evening News Thursday. And, in this instance, it took less than five weeks for the story to change.
Anchor Bob Schieffer invited former CIA member and current CBS News analyst Michael Scheuer on to discuss Zarqawi’s death. Schieffer began the interview:

“Michael, I want to ask you, it’s my understanding you believe this might actually increase danger for US troops.”
Yes, you read that right: on a day when America should have been celebrating the death of one of her greatest enemies, a top CBS anchorman actually brought on a guest to discuss how this might “increase danger for US troops.” Scheuer conveniently responded:

“I think that’s probably the case, Bob.”

Schieffer then asked his guest what the significance of Zarqawi’s death was. Scheuer answered:

“Strategically it’s not very important.”

Yet, the Evening News didn’t always feel that Zarqawi’s death or capture would “increase the danger for US troops” or be strategically “not very important.” Less than five weeks earlier, the Evening News did an entire story called “Task Force 145 leads hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” Schieffer began that May 2 segment:

“The toll of American military people killed in Iraq reached 2,400 today, with the death of another American soldier killed by a roadside bomb. That news came as our David Martin learned more details of an intense new campaign that American troops have launched to track down top al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”

Schieffer then handed it off to Martin, who winded the segment down by saying, “Getting Zarqawi would be a major victory,” and concluded:

“If or when the end comes, he will almost certainly be replaced by another terrorist, but it is unlikely his replacement will be the equal of Zarqawi.”

As such, it is infinitely clear that the media’s view of Zarqawi changed virtually the moment he was killed. In fact, their response to what they had presaged in the past would be great news if it happened was instead designed to dampen the public’s enthusiasm for the event, while at the same time diminish any positive the Bush administration could gain from it here at home.

Sadly, such behavior is yet another example of a press clearly acting in its own best interests without regard for that of the American people much in the same way as the politicians they revere.

After all, it has been suggested for many years that members of America’s two major parties base policy decisions almost exclusively on a calculus for re-election and not on what actually would be beneficial to the public they serve. Many experts believe that such strategic planning begins almost immediately after Election Day, and dictates every move these politicians make until the next important first Tuesday in November.

With disturbing similarity, the atrocious behavior of the drive-by media makes it quite apparent that the same can be said of most press representatives today. Since at least the year 2000, it seems virtually every mainstream report of a current event has been meticulously crafted to further the goals of politicians favored by the media, while acting to thwart the efforts of those whose views are considered to be unacceptable by these supposedly enlightened journalists regardless of what position of power or responsibility they hold.
For those that question this conclusion, just imagine all the terrorists and their leaders in Iraq laying down their arms and declaring a truce with the new Iraqi government as the American media question whether this will be good for peace in the region.
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Democrats Are Winning... Except at the Polls

Composed by the two entities that get it right, every time: Real Clear Politics.com, and Michael Barone, who writes for them here. Forget the apocalyptic predictions of the drive-by media of a demo sweep in November. We are in fine shape, and experts who are in the know expect a status quo election, as do I.....T
"This is just to cover Bush's (rear) so he doesn't have to answer questions" about things in Iraq, said Rep. Pete Stark, second ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. "This insurgency is such a confused mess that one person, dead or alive at this point, is hardly significant today," said Rep. Jim McDermott, formerly the lead Democrat on the House ethics committee. The deceased, said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a candidate for the 2004 presidential nomination, was a small part of "a growing anti-American insurgency." He said the United States should get out of Iraq. "We're there for all the wrong reasons."

Such was the reaction of the left wing of the Democratic Party to the killing of al-Qaida terrorist Abu Masab Zarqawi in Iraq. It was not the dominant note sounded by Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry all hailed the death of Zarqawi in unequivocal terms. And if Democrats also made the point that his death probably won't end the violence in Iraq, they were only echoing what George W. Bush said.

Nevertheless the Stark-McDermott-Kucinich reaction, echoed and amplified, often scatologically, by dozens of commenters on the popular dailykos.com and myDD.com left-wing Websites, tells us something disturbing about the Democratic Party -- and provides a clue why Democrats were unable to eke out a win in last week's special congressional election in the 50th congressional district of California.

It comes down to this: A substantial part of the Democratic Party, some of its politicians and many of its loudest supporters do not want America to succeed in Iraq. So vitriolic and all-consuming is their hatred for George W. Bush that they skip right over the worthy goals we have been, with some considerable success, seeking there -- a democratic government, with guaranteed liberties for all, a vibrant free economy, respect for women -- and call this a war for oil, or for Halliburton.

Successes are discounted, setbacks are trumpeted, the level of American casualties is treated as if it were comparable to those in Vietnam or World War II. Allegations of American misdeeds are repeated over and over; the work of reconstruction and aid of American military personnel and civilians is ignored.

In all this they have been aided and abetted by large elements of the press. The struggle in Iraq has been portrayed as a story of endless and increasing violence. Stories of success and heroism tend to go unreported. Reporters in Iraq deserve respect for their courage -- this has been an unusually deadly war for journalists, largely because they have been targeted by the terrorists. But unfortunately they and the Bush administration have not done a good job of letting us know that last pertinent fact.

We are in an asymmetrical struggle with vicious enemies who slaughter civilians and bystanders and journalists without any regard for the laws of war. But too often we and our enemies are portrayed as moral equivalents. One or two instances of American misconduct are found equal in the balance to a consistent and premeditated campaign of barbarism.

All of this does not go unnoticed by America's voters. The persistence of violence in Iraq has done grave damage to George W. Bush's job rating, and polls show that his fellow Republicans are in trouble. Yet when people actually vote, those numbers don't seem to translate into gains for the Democrats. In 2004, John Kerry got 44 percent of the votes in the 50th district of California. In the April 2006 special primary, Democrat Francine Busby got 44 percent of the votes there. In the runoff last week, she got 45 percent and lost to Republican Brian Bilbray.

The angry Democratic left set the tone for the 2003-04 campaign for the party's presidential nomination, and John Kerry hoped that it would produce a surge in turnout in November 2004. It did: Kerry got 16 percent more popular votes than Al Gore. But George W. Bush got 23 percent more popular votes in 2004 than in 2000.

In California's 50th, both parties made mammoth turnout efforts, but the balance of turnout and of opinion seems to have remained the same, even though Democrats had a seriously contested primary for governor and Republicans didn't. The angry Democratic left and its aiders and abettors in the press seem to have succeeded in souring public opinion, but they haven't succeeded in producing victory margins for the Democrats. Maybe they're doing just the opposite.
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A Good Day's Work. Why Zarqawi's death matters

Burn in Hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!...T
The death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is excellent news in its own right and even more excellent if, as U.S. sources in Iraq are claiming, it resulted from information that derived from people who were or had been close to him. (And, if that claim is black propaganda, then it is clever black propaganda, which is also excellent news.)

It hasn't taken long for the rain to start falling on this parade. Nick Berg's father, a MoveOn type now running for Congress on the Green Party ticket, has already said that he blames President George Bush for the video-beheading of his own son (but of course) and mourned the passing of Zarqawi as he would the death of any man (but of course, again). The latest Atlantic has a brilliantly timed cover story by Mary Anne Weaver, which tends to the view that Zarqawi was essentially an American creation, but seems to undermine its own prominence by suggesting that, in addition to that, Zarqawi wasn't all that important.

Not so fast. Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism. He was able to help ensure that the Iraqi people did not have one single day of respite between 35 years of war and fascism, and the last three-and-a-half years of misery and sabotage. He chose his targets with an almost diabolical cunning, destroying the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (and murdering the heroic envoy Sérgio Vieira de Melo) almost before it could begin operations, and killing the leading Shiite Ayatollah Hakim outside his place of worship in Najaf. His decision to declare a jihad against the Shiite population in general, in a document of which Weaver (on no evidence) doubts the authenticity, has been the key innovation of the insurgency: applying lethal pressure to the most vulnerable aspect of Iraqi society. And it has had the intended effect, by undermining Grand Ayatollah Sistani and helping empower Iranian-backed Shiite death squads.

Not bad for a semiliterate goon and former jailhouse enforcer from a Bedouin clan in Jordan. There are two important questions concerning the terrible influence that he has been able to exert. The first is: How much state and para-state support did he enjoy? The second is: What was the nature of his relationship with Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida?

For the defeatists and pacifists, these are easy questions to answer. Colin Powell was wrong to identify Zarqawi, in his now-notorious U.N. address, as a link between the Saddam regime and the Bin-Ladenists. The man's power was created only by the coalition's intervention, and his connection to al Qaida was principally opportunistic. On this logic, the original mistake of the United States would have been to invade Afghanistan, thereby forcing Zarqawi to flee his camp outside Herat and repositioning him for a new combat elsewhere. Thus, fighting against al-Qaida is a mistake to begin with: It only encourages them.

I think that (for once) Colin Powell was on to something. I know that Kurdish intelligence had been warning the coalition for some time before the invasion that former Afghanistan combatants were making their way into Iraq, which they saw as the next best chance to take advantage of a state that was both "failed" and "rogue." One might add that Iraq under Saddam was not an easy country to enter or to leave, and that no decision on who was allowed in would be taken by a junior officer. Furthermore, the Zarqawi elements appear to have found it their duty to join with the Ansar al-Islam splinter group in Kurdistan, which for some reason thought it was the highest duty of jihad to murder Saddam Hussein's main enemies. But perhaps I have a suspicious mind.

We happen to know that the Baathist regime was recruiting and training foreign fighters and brigading them with the gruesome "Fedayeen Saddam." (This is incidentally a clue to what the successor regime in Iraq might have looked like as the Saddam-plus-sanctions state imploded and Baathism itself went into eclipse.) That bomb at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, for example, was no improvised explosive device. It was a huge charge of military-grade ordnance. Are we to believe that a newly arrived Bedouin Jordanian thug could so swiftly have scraped acquaintance with senior-level former Baathists? (The charges that destroyed the golden dome of the Shiites in Samarra were likewise rigged and set by professional military demolitionists.)

Zarqawi's relations with Bin Laden are a little more tortuous. Mary Anne Weaver shows fairly convincingly that the two men did not get along and were in some sense rivals for the leadership. That's natural enough: Religious fanatics are schismatic by definition. Zarqawi's visceral hatred of the Shiite heresy was unsettling even to some more mainstream Wahhabi types, as was his undue relish in making snuff videos. (How nice to know that these people do have their standards.) However, when Zarqawi sought the franchise to call his group "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia," he was granted it with only a few admonitions.

Most fascinating of all is the suggestion that Zarqawi was all along receiving help from the mullahs in Iran. He certainly seems to have been able to transit their territory (Herat is on the Iranian border with Afghanistan) and to replenish his forces by the same route. If this suggestive connection is proved, as Weaver suggests it will be, then we have the Shiite fundamentalists in Iran directly sponsoring the murderer of their co-religionists in Iraq. This in turn would mean that the Iranian mullahs stood convicted of the most brutish and cynical irresponsibility, in front of their own people, even as they try to distract attention from their covert nuclear ambitions. That would be worth knowing. And it would become rather difficult to argue that Bush had made them do it, though no doubt the attempt will be made.

If we had withdrawn from Iraq already, as the "peace" movement has been demanding, then one of the most revolting criminals of all time would have been able to claim that he forced us to do it. That would have catapulted Iraq into Stone Age collapse and instated a psychopathic killer as the greatest Muslim soldier since Saladin. As it is, the man is ignominiously dead and his dirty connections a lot closer to being fully exposed. This seems like a good day's work to me.

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Never Again?

Time for some historic perspective, and no, not even the usual "Hitler" analogy. Krauthammer reminds us of the stakes in Iran today, and why you people (and you know who you are) who are of the "no blood for oil" ilk used to be compared to Neville Chamberlain...T
When something happens for the first time in 1,871 years, it is worth noting. In A.D. 70, and again in 135, the Roman Empire brutally put down Jewish revolts in Judea, destroying Jerusalem, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and sending hundreds of thousands more into slavery and exile. For nearly two millennia, the Jews wandered the world. And now, in 2006, for the first time since then, there are once again more Jews living in Israel -- the successor state to Judea -- than in any other place on Earth.

Israel's Jewish population has just passed 5.6 million. America's Jewish population was about 5.5 million in 1990, dropped to about 5.2 million 10 years later and is in a precipitous decline that, because of low fertility rates and high levels of assimilation, will cut that number in half by mid-century.

When 6 million European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, only two main centers of Jewish life remained: America and Israel. That binary star system remains today, but a tipping point has just been reached. With every year, as the Jewish population continues to rise in Israel and decline in America (and in the rest of the Diaspora), Israel increasingly becomes, as it was at the time of Jesus, the center of the Jewish world.

An epic restoration, and one of the most improbable. To take just one of the remarkable achievements of the return: Hebrew is the only "dead" language in recorded history to have been brought back to daily use as the living language of a nation. But there is a price and a danger to this transformation. It radically alters the prospects for Jewish survival.

For 2,000 years, Jews found protection in dispersion -- protection not for individual communities, which were routinely persecuted and massacred, but protection for the Jewish people as a whole. Decimated here, they could survive there. They could be persecuted in Spain and find refuge in Constantinople. They could be massacred in the Rhineland during the Crusades or in the Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky Insurrection of 1648-49 and yet survive in the rest of Europe.

Hitler put an end to that illusion. He demonstrated that modern anti-Semitism married to modern technology -- railroads, disciplined bureaucracies, gas chambers that kill with industrial efficiency -- could take a scattered people and "concentrate" them for annihilation.

The establishment of Israel was a Jewish declaration to a world that had allowed the Holocaust to happen -- after Hitler had made his intentions perfectly clear -- that the Jews would henceforth resort to self-protection and self-reliance. And so they have, building a Jewish army, the first in 2,000 years, that prevailed in three great wars of survival (1948-49, 1967 and 1973).

But in a cruel historical irony, doing so required concentration -- putting all the eggs back in one basket, a tiny territory hard by the Mediterranean, eight miles wide at its waist. A tempting target for those who would finish Hitler's work.

His successors now reside in Tehran. The world has paid ample attention to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that Israel must be destroyed. Less attention has been paid to Iranian leaders' pronouncements on exactly how Israel would be "eliminated by one storm," as Ahmadinejad has promised.

Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the presumed moderate of this gang, has explained that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam." The logic is impeccable, the intention clear: A nuclear attack would effectively destroy tiny Israel, while any retaliation launched by a dying Israel would have no major effect on an Islamic civilization of a billion people stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.

As it races to acquire nuclear weapons, Iran makes clear that if there is any trouble, the Jews will be the first to suffer. "We have announced that wherever [in Iran] America does make any mischief, the first place we target will be Israel," said Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top Revolutionary Guards commander. Hitler was only slightly more direct when he announced seven months before invading Poland that, if there was another war, "the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

Last week Bernard Lewis, America's dean of Islamic studies, who just turned 90 and remembers the 20th century well, confessed that for the first time he feels it is 1938 again. He did not need to add that in 1938, in the face of the gathering storm -- a fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly of the Jews -- the world did nothing.

When Iran's mullahs acquire their coveted nukes in the next few years, the number of Jews in Israel will just be reaching 6 million. Never again?
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"Impeach Bush!" 

At last our lefties see the light: Misguided support for dictators destroyed the left’s credibility

One more time, for the record: It's not our war, it's theirs! They started it, and no less a high brow intellectual lefty than Christopher Hitchens sticks it "where the sun don't shine" in this open letter to his fallen left wing comrades. Print this one, and carry it in your wallet, like, well, like they carried Mao's little Red Book!..T
One can stare at a simple sign or banner or placard for a long time before its true meaning discloses itself. The late John Sparrow, warden of All Souls College, Oxford, was once struck motionless by a notice at the foot of the escalator at Oxford Circus Tube station. “Dogs,” it read, “must be carried.” What to do then, wondered this celebrated pedant, if you hadn’t got a dog with you?

And then there came a day, well evoked by Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday, when hundreds of people I knew were prepared to traipse through the streets of London behind a huge banner that read “No war on Iraq. Freedom for Palestine”. This was in fact the official slogan of the organisers. Let us gaze at these two simple injunctions for a second.


Nobody had actually ever proposed a war “on” Iraq. It had been argued, whether persuasively or not, that Iraq and the world would be improved by the advent of the post-Saddam Hussein era. There was already a war in Iraq, with Kurdish guerrillas battling the Ba’athist regime and Anglo-American airborne patrols enforcing a “no-fly zone” in order to prevent the renewal of the 1991 attempted genocide in the Kurdish north and the Shi’ite south.


I certainly heard arguments in favour of a war for Iraq. A few months before the intervention, Dr Barham Salih — one of the leaders of the autonomous Kurdish region — flew to Rome to speak at a conference of the Socialist International (of which his party is a member). The place of the left, he said, was on the side of those battling against fascism. I went to Blackpool at about the same time to make a similar point at the annual Tribune rally at the Labour party conference.


The war “for” and “over” and “in” Iraq, in other words, had been going on for some time and I, for one, had taken a side in it.


What is then left of the word “on”? Should it not really have read “No quarrel with Saddam Hussein”? That would have been more accurate but perhaps less catchy. You keep hearing leaders of the anti-war crowd protesting that they don’t “really” act as apologists for Saddam. But this, if true, could easily have been demonstrated. “Hands off Iraq — but freedom for Kurdistan”, say. (This was, in fact, the position taken by many Arab leftists.)


“Freedom for Palestine”, though. What exactly is that doing there? Why not freedom for Lebanon, or Syria, which are just as far away? Or Darfur? No, it had to be Palestine, because the subject had to be changed. This was indeed the favourite tactic of Saddam himself. He never mentioned the Palestinians on the day he invaded and annexed Kuwait (and incidentally ruined, as Edward Said pointed out, the lives of the thriving Palestinian diaspora in that small country).


But as soon as he had exhausted the patience of the United Nations, Saddam began to yell that he would never surrender the territory he had stolen unless the Israelis ended their occupation, too. (An amusing subconscious equation between the two offences, incidentally, even if Saddam does share, with his hated Iranian foes, the desire to see Israel obliterated entirely.) In the waning years of the Ba’ath regime, Baghdad radio and television kept up a ceaseless rant of jihad, calling on all true Muslims to rally to the side of Saddam as part of the battle for Jerusalem.


So that was what was actually happening on that celebrated “Saturday”. A vast crowd of people reiterating the identical mantras of Ba’athism — one of the most depraved and reactionary ideologies of the past century. How on earth, or how the hell, did we arrive at this sordid terminus? How is it that the anti-war movement’s favourite MP, George Galloway, has a warm if not slightly sickly relationship with dictators in Baghdad and Damascus?


How comes it that Ramsey Clark, the equivalent public face in America, is one of Saddam’s legal team and has argued that he was justified in committing the hideous crimes of which he stands accused? Why is the left’s beloved cultural icon, Michael Moore, saying that the “insurgents” in Iraq are the equivalent of the American revolutionaries of 1776?


I believe there are three explanations for this horrid mutation of the left into a reactionary and nihilistic force. The first is nostalgia for the vanished “People’s Democracies” of the state socialist era. This has been stated plainly by Galloway and by Clark, whose political sect in the United States also defends Castro and Kim Jong-il.


The bulk of the anti-war movement also opposed the removal of the Muslim-slayer Slobodan Milosevic, which incidentally proves that their professed sympathy with oppressed Muslims is mainly a pose.


However, that professed sympathy does help us to understand the second motive. To many callow leftists, the turbulent masses of the Islamic world are at once a reminder of the glory days of “Third World” revolution, and a hasty substitute for the vanished proletariat of yore. Galloway has said as much in so many words and my old publishers at New Left Review have produced a book of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches in which he is compared with Che Guevara.


The third reason, not quite so well laid out by the rather 10th-rate theoreticians of today’s left, is that once you decide that American-led “globalisation” is the main enemy, then any revolt against it is better than none at all. In some way yet to be determined, Al-Qaeda might be able to help to stave off global warming. (I have not yet checked to see how this is squared with Bin Laden’s diatribe of last weekend, summoning all holy warrior aid to the genocidal rulers of Sudan as they complete the murder of African Muslims, and as they sell all their oil to China to create a whole new system of carbon emissions in Asia. At first sight, it looks like blood for oil to me.)


This hectic collapse in the face of brutish irrationality and the most cynical realpolitik has taken far too long to produce antibodies on the left. However, a few old hands and some sharp and promising new ones have got together and produced a statement that is named after the especially unappealing (to me) area of London in which it was discussed and written.


The “Euston Manifesto” keeps it simple. It prefers democratic pluralism, at any price, to theocracy. It raises an eyebrow at the enslavement of the female half of the population and the burial alive of homosexuals. It has its reservations about the United States, but knows that if anything is ever done about (say) Darfur, it will be Washington that receives the UN mandate to do the heavy lifting.


It prefers those who vote in Iraq and Afghanistan to those who put bombs in mosques and schools and hospitals. It does not conceive of arguments that make excuses for suicide murderers. It affirms the right of democratic nations and open societies to defend themselves, both from theocratic states abroad and from theocratic gangsters at home.


I have been flattered by an invitation to sign it, and I probably will, but if I agree it will be the most conservative document that I have ever initialled. Even the obvious has now become revolutionary. So call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one. Click here for full article

Anti-Anti-Americanism: Dealing with the crazy world after Iraq

I feel better inside after reading Hanson. A historian of renown, with a powerful emotional appeal to patriotism, that makes you feel better than "punching out" Cindy Sheehan (well, ok, not THAT good!). And, yeah, when is SOMEONE going to do something about Chavez?!...T

How does the United States deal with a corrupt world in which we are blamed even for the good we do, while others are praised when they do wrong or remain indifferent to suffering?

We are accused of unilateral and preemptory bullying of the madman Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose reactors that will be used to “wipe out” the “one-bomb” state of Israel were supplied by Swiss, German, and Russian profit-minded businessmen. No one thinks to chastise those who sold Iran the capability of destroying Israel.

Here in the United States we worry whether we are tough enough with the Gulf sheikdoms in promoting human rights and democratic reform. Meanwhile China simply offers them cash for oil, no questions asked. Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez pose as anti-Western zealots to Western naifs. The one has never held an election; the other tries his best to end the democracy that brought him to power. Meanwhile our fretting elites, back from Europe or South America, write ever more books on why George Bush and the Americans are not liked.

Hamas screams that we are mean for our logical suggestion that free American taxpayers will not subsidize such killers and terrorists. Those in the Middle East whine about Islamophobia, but keep silent that there is not allowed a Sunni mosque in Iran or a Christian church in Saudi Arabia. An entire book could be written about the imams and theocrats — in Iran, Egypt, the West Bank, Pakistan, and the Gulf States — who in safety issue fatwas and death pronouncements against Americans in Iraq and any who deal with the “infidel,” and yet send their spoiled children to private schools in Britain and the United States, paid for by their own blackmail money from corrupt governments.

You get the overall roundup: the Europeans have simply absorbed as their own the key elements of ossified French foreign policy — utopian rhetoric and anti-Americanism can pretty much give you a global pass to sell anything you wish to anyone at anytime.

China is more savvy. It discards every disastrous economic policy Mao ever enacted, but keeps two cornerstones of Maoist dogma: imply force to bully, and keep the veneer of revolutionary egalitarianism to mask cutthroat capitalism and diplomacy, from copyright theft and intellectual piracy to smiling at rogue clients like North Korea and disputing the territorial claims of almost every neighbor in sight.

Oil cuts a lot of idealism in the Middle East. The cynicism is summed up simply as “Those who sell lecture, and those who buy listen.” American efforts in Iraq — the largest aid program since the Marshall Plan, where American blood and treasure go to birth democracy — are libeled as “no blood for oil.” Yet a profiteering Saudi Arabia or Kuwait does more to impoverish poor oil-importing African and Asian nations than any regime on earth. But this sick, corrupt world keeps mum.

And why not ask Saudi Arabia about its now lionized and well-off al-Ghamdi clan? Aside from the various Ghamdi terrorists and bin-Laden hangers-on, remember young Ahmad, the 20-year-old medical student who packed his suicide vest with ball bearings and headed for Mosul, where he blew up 18 Americans? Or how about dear Ahmad and Hamza, the Ghamdis who helped crash Flight 175 into the South Tower on September 11? And please do not forget either the Saudi icon Said Ghamdi, who, had he not met Todd Beamer and Co. on Flight 93, would have incinerated the White House or the Capitol.

So we know the symptoms of this one-sided anti-Americanism and its strange combination of hatred, envy, and yearning — but, so far, not its remedy. In the meantime, the global caricature of the United States, in the aftermath of Iraq, is proving near fatal to the Bush administration, whose idealism and sharp break with past cynical realpolitik have earned it outright disdain. Indeed, the more al Qaeda is scattered, and the more Iraq looks like it will eventually emerge as a constitutional government, the angrier the world seems to become at the United States. American success, it seems, is even worse than failure.

Some of the criticism is inevitable. America is in an unpopular reconstruction of Iraq that has cost lives and treasure. Observers looked only at the explosions, never what the sacrifice was for — especially when it is rare for an Afghan or Iraqi ever to visit the United States to express thanks for giving their peoples a reprieve from the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

We should also accept that the United States, as the world’s policeman, always suffers the easy hatred of the cops, who are as ankle-bitten when things are calm as they are desperately sought when danger looms. America is the genitor and largest donor to the United Nations. Its military is the ultimate guarantor of free commerce by land and sea, and its wide-open market proves the catalyst of international trade. More immigrants seek its shores than all other designations combined — especially from countries of Latin America, whose criticism of the United States is the loudest.

Nevertheless, while we cannot stop anti-Americanism, here (a consequence, in part, of a deep-seeded, irrational sense of inferiority) and abroad, we can adopt a wiser stance that puts the onus of responsibility more on our critics.

We have a window of 1 to 3 years in Iran before it deploys nuclear weapons. Let Ahmadinejad talk and write — the loonier and longer, the better, as we smile and ignore him and his monstrous ilk.

Let also the Europeans and Arabs come to us to ask our help, as sphinx-like we express “concern” for their security needs. Meanwhile we should continue to try to appeal to Iranian dissidents, stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, and resolve that at the eleventh hour this nut with his head in a well will not obtain the methods to destroy what we once knew as the West.

Ditto with Hamas. Don’t demonize it — just don’t give it any money. Praise democracy, but not what was elected.

We should curtail money to Mr. Mubarak as well. No need for any more sermons on democracy — been there, done that. Now we should accept with quiet resignation that if an aggregate $50 billion in give-aways have earned us the most anti-American voices in the Middle East, then a big fat zero for Egypt might be an improvement. After all, there must be something wrong with a country that gave us both Mohammad Atta and Dr. Zawahiri.

The international Left loves to champion humanitarian causes that do not involve the immediate security needs of the United States, damning us for inaction even as they are the first to slander us for being military interventionists. We know the script of Haiti, Mogadishu, and the Balkans, where Americans are invited in, and then harped at both for using and not using force. Where successful, the credit goes elsewhere; failure is always ours alone. Still, we should organize multinational efforts to save those in Darfur — but only after privately insisting that every American soldier must be matched by a European, Chinese, and Russian peacekeeper.

There are other ways to curb our exposure to irrational hatred that seems so to demoralize the American public. First, we should cease our Olympian indifference to hypocrisy, instead pointing out politely inconsistencies in European, Middle Eastern, and Chinese morality. Why not express more concern about the inexplicable death of Balkan kingpin prisoners at The Hague or European sales of nuclear technology to madmen or institutionalized Chinese theft of intellectual property?

We need to reexamine the nature of our overseas American bases, elevating the political to the strategic, which, it turns out, are inseparable after all. To take one small example: When Greeks pour out on their streets to rage at a visiting American secretary of State, we should ask ourselves, do we really need a base in Crete that is so costly in rent and yet ensures Greeks security without responsibility or maturity? Surely once we leave, those brave opportunistic souls in the streets of Athens can talk peace with the newly Islamist Turkish government, solve Cyprus on their own, or fend off terrorists from across the Mediterranean.

The point is not to be gratuitously punitive or devolve into isolationism, but to continue to apply to Europe the model that was so successful in the Philippines and now South Korea — ongoing redeployment of Americans to where we can still strike in emergencies, but without empowering hypocritical hosts in time of peace.

We must also sound in international fora as friendly and cooperative as possible with the Russians, Chinese, and the lunatic Latin American populists — even as we firm up our contingency plans and strengthen military ties of convenience with concerned states like Australia, Japan, India, and Brazil.

The United States must control our borders, for reasons that transcend even terrorism and national security. One way to cool the populist hatred emanating from Latin America is to ensure that it becomes a privilege, not a birthright, to enter the United States. In traveling the Middle East, I notice the greatest private complaint is not Israel or even Iraq, but the inability to enter the United States as freely as in the past. And that, oddly, is not necessarily a bad thing, as those who damn us are slowly learning that their cheap hatred has had real consequences.

Then there is, of course, oil. It is the great distorter, one that punishes the hard-working poor states who need fuel to power their reforming economies while rewarding failed regimes for their mischief, by the simple accident that someone else discovered it, developed it, and then must purchase it from under their dictatorial feet. We must drill, conserve, invent, and substitute our way out of this crisis to ensure the integrity of our foreign policy, to stop the subsidy of crazies like Chavez and Ahmadinejad, and to lower the world price of petroleum that taxes those who can least afford it. There is a reason, after all, why the al-Ghamdis are popular icons in Saudi Arabia rather than on the receiving end of a cruise missile.

So we need more firm explanation, less loud assertion, more quiet with our enemies, more lectures to neutrals and friends — and always the very subtle message that cheap anti-Americanism will eventually have consequences.
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The November Showdown

The most informed man in America (on political affairs), aside from Michael Barone, makes his assessment of the current political landscape, and his predictions for November 2006...T

The Washington Post has now caught up with Painting the Map Red, with the paper reporting on its front page that the House of Representatives could in fact see a Democratic majority when the smoke clears in November.
But while there remain very troubling signs for the GOP in both House and Senate --my World column this week addresses the split among conservative pundits, for example,-- the debate over immigration and border security this week was a significant plus for the GOP. That debate demonstrated that there is a serious commitment to border security within the GOP and that the opposition to border security is at home in the Democratic Party.

Similarly, the party with a caucus that genuinely worries about assimilation is the GOP. The Democrats found it necessary to water down an already almost wholly rhetorical "English-first" amendment.

"Painting the Map Red" warned the GOP that it had to handle the immigration/border security issue very carefully so as to remain a party thatwelcomes Latino voters, and it has done that this week, while at the same time delivering on border security and common sense restraints on new immigration flows. (Only the vote on social security benefits went the wrong way, but the conference can fix that.)

This was also the week that saw the sixth straight year of tax cuts pass, and two of the promised new federal circuit court nominees emerge from the White House, and promises renewed of the next seven or eight to follow. The Marriage Amendment moved out of the Judiciary Committee on its way to a vote on cloture in early June that will put all senators on record as for or against the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, the Iraq government emerged, and, most important of all, the growing recognition that the Iranian Crisis can not --despite the heartfelt wishes of some-- be talked away.

The angry chorus of disaffected conservatives may also have hit their loudest notes this week, and the publication of this handy chart, with its reminders of a Chairman Conyers, Chairman Rangel, Chairman Frank, Chairman Murtha, and Chairman McDermott as well as Speaker Pelosi, may have actually been the most important piece of web-produced polemic in this cycle.

There was a disapppointment in Florida, as many had believed Alan Bense would enter the race against Bill Nelson, and now that red state's blue senate seat looks very safe.
But the votes of Maria Cantwell in Washington State and Robert Menedez in New Jersey againt fencing 20% of the border and against declaring English as the official language made both of those races very competitive, and incumbent GOP senators in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and Montana can take the reality of their party's much tougher positions on security to their voters in the fall.

The competitive House races identified by the Post as well as others in which Dems are imperiled will be fought out on very small fields, but the big nine senate races are these:

New Jersey: Incumbent Democrat Menedez v. the GOP's Tom Kean.
Maryland: The GOP's Lt. Governor Michael Steele v. the battered winner of the Mfume-Cardin slug fest.
Pennsylvania: GOP Incumbent Rick Santorum against Bob Casey Jr.
Ohio: GOP Incumbent Mike DeWine v. Congressman Sherrod Brown
Missouri: GOP Incumbent Jim Talent v. Claire McCaskill
Montana: GOP Incumbent Conrad Burns v. either John Morrison and Jon Tester.
Minnesota: GOP Congressman Mark Kennedy v. Amy Klobuchar
Nebraska: Pete Ricketts v. Democratic incumbent Ben Nelson
Washington State: Mike McGavick v. Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell

With the right campaigns, adequate funding, and continued focus on the deep differences between the parties on the war, judges, taxes, spending and the border, the Senate could return in '07 strengthened, not depleted. Click here for full article

Liberalism: A defect of the rational mind, i.e; Up can be thought to be down: perspective (politics) detemines whether one approves, or dissaproves, of an idea or policy or action 

We continue to live in the world of Thatcher & Reagan

Explains, at once, both Bush's current low Poll numbers, and why GWBush has been a transformational president. Thanks again to "CornetJim" for this one!...T

As Washington insiders pore over the latest low job-approval ratings for George W. Bush, and as aficionados of British politics ponder the latest low ratings of Tony Blair, let's take a longer look at the political ebb and flow in America and Britain over the last quarter century or so. There is a certain parallelism.
In the late 1970s, both countries experienced something like collapse -- a collapse of the Keynesian economics dominant in the post-World War II years, a collapse of the accommodationist foreign policy prevailing since the setback in Vietnam.
From that collapse arose two improbable leaders on the political right: Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. By conventional standards, they were unacceptable: Thatcher was a woman, Reagan a septuagenarian __ and both were too far to the right. Their policies were attacked as hardhearted and reckless. But they worked. Economic growth resumed, Britain triumphed in the Falklands, and America prevailed in the Cold War. Thatcher lasted 11 years in office, Reagan eight __ both were followed by lukewarm but clearly right successors, John Major for seven years and George H.W. Bush for four.
The policy and political success of the parties of the right in time produced a center-left response from the opposition. Bill Clinton in America and Tony Blair in Britain largely accepted the Reagan and Thatcher policies and promised modifications at the margins. A successful formula: Clinton won in 1992 and 1996, and served eight years; Blair won in 1997, 2001 and 2005, and has now been in office more than nine years.
When you look back at all these leaders' job ratings in office, you find an interesting thing. The transformational Thatcher and Reagan had negative to neutral job ratings during most of their longer years in power. Thatcher's peaked upward after the Falklands victory; Reagan peaked from his re-election until the Iran-Contra scandal broke two years later. Their divisiveness, the stark alternative they presented with the policies and conventional wisdom of the past -- all these held down their job ratings.
In contrast, Blair and Clinton for most of their years in office had quite high job ratings. Blair's ratings for his first eight years were probably the highest in British history. Clinton, after he got over his lurch to the left in 1993-94, also enjoyed high job ratings, especially when he was threatened with impeachment. The center-left alternative, by accepting most of the Thatcher and Reagan programs, was relatively uncontroversial, determinedly consensus-minded, widely acceptable to the left, center-left and much of the center-right segments of the electorate.
Thus, the crunchy, confrontational right was in its years in power not so widely popular as the soggy, consensus-minded center-left. Yet surely history will regard Thatcher and Reagan as more consequential leaders than Blair and Clinton. Thatcher and Reagan defined the issues and argued that, as Thatcher once famously said, "There is no alternative."
Blair and Clinton mostly accepted the definitions of the right and then deftly articulated an acceptable center-left alternative. As a left Labor M.P. critical of Blair recently wrote in the Times of London: "Mrs. Thatcher, even at her most controversial, thought, acted and governed with the grain of her ordinary party members. But Tony Blair has tested to destruction the idea that you can run the Labor Party in total opposition to its dearest-held beliefs and values."
It is in this context that we should consider George W. Bush's current poor job ratings. For all the high ratings for center-left leaders, it remains true in America and Britain that the policies of the right are more acceptable than the policies of the left -- and are capable of beating the center-left, too. George W. Bush fashioned a right appeal that succeeded in defeating Bill Clinton's handpicked successor. Britain's Conservatives, preoccupied by the bitter split over Thatcher's ouster in 1990, failed to provide a viable alternative to Blair for a dozen years.
But today, under David Cameron (who was 24 when Thatcher got the boot), they are doing so. It is in the nature of things that the right, while sharply defining the issues and winning most serious arguments, should also stir more bitter opposition than the soothing, consensus-minded center-left. All the more so because Old Media in this country, more than in Britain, is dominated by a left that incessantly peppers the right with ridicule and criticism, while it lavishes the center-left with celebration and praise.
Even so, we continue to live in the world of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as we once lived in the world of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Click here for full article

Looking Ahead to Monday's Speech

This is Hugh Hewitt's take on the current US political atmosphere. While I don't buy the "Feeding Frenzy" of doom the media portrays, I do think his advice to the Bush White House, to play to the base, is needed right now politically, and also makes for sound policy...I would emphasise the Judges over Border Security, but that is the huge issue to many right now, justified or not...T

"The president's speech on Monday night is a huge moment for him, a rare chance to recapture the momentum on the issue of border security and with it, renew the country's confidence in his commitment to national security, a confidence first shaken by the ports deal, and eroded by the long negotiations to form the Iraqi government.

Already the anti-amnesty forces are dismissing the speech as window dressing for the Senate debate to follow, arguing that rumored National Gaurd deployments are temporary and designed only to facilitate the amnesty that isn't called an amnesty.

The president needs to announce that the Guard will indeed be deployed in support of the Customs and Border personnel, but that the key to lasting border security is the dramatic expansion of border fencing in keeping with the House bill.

He should urge that the Senate adopt the House language in this regard (along with any other language necessary to assure that the construction of the 700 miles of fencing not be subject to any other law that might inhibit the quick start and completion of the projects.)

He must avoid the word 'virtual,' as in 'virtual fencing.' The White House isn't surrounded by a 'virtual fence,' and voters have no faith in 'virtual fences' except as supplemts to the real thing.

If the president comes out early and hard in favor of expanding the fences along the border which have already worked so successfully in urban areas, he will have met the American public where it is with what it demands.

The rest of the president's speech will not affect its impact one way or the other. The only other details that will resonate widely will be the assurance that no one becomes a citizen without command of English and then only after many years of productive residency in the U.S.

It is all about the fence because it is all about security, the next 11 or 12 million, not the 11 or 12 million already here.

A great speech will tie this concern about security and the fencing security requires into the NSA program(s) much debated in recent days and months, as well as the economic security brought about by the tax cuts past and present (and future), coupled with spending restraint.

The big close should be twofold. First, the announcement of the nomination of two score judges to replenish the federal bench, a demand that the Senate act quickly on these nominations, and a commitment to require --as he has of these nominees-- only what every oath sworn by every official requires: A commitment to uphold the laws of the United States.

Following that announcement, a congratulations to the new government in Iraq that is forming, and a thanks to the troops that have delivered the Iraqi people a genuine government, the sort of government that will bring the stability the region needs. A few words about the patience and sacrifice required for real security, the sort of patience and sacrificie that marked the immigrants that brought his forebears and almost all of ours to these shores, and which still marks the newly arrived to this country.

In short, the president can put the agenda he has built back at the center of the political and policy debate:

Win the war.

Confirm the judges.

Cut the taxes.

Control the spending.

Secure the border.

And he can do so in the context of the overarching themes of his presidency: Confidence in the goodness of the American people and the greatness of the country's calling.
UPDATE: Powerline points me to a piece by the New York Post's Deborah Orin on the outline of the president's speech Monday night.

Pray that she's wrong. The use by the president of the term "virtual fence" is in fact a declaration against the realthing, and it would undo every bit of good he intends to accomplish via the address.

Faced with suspicion from his base that he really doesn't intend to enforce the border, the president simply can't proclaim a "virtual fence" as a substitute for the real thing and expect people to treat it as a serious attempt to satisfy border security advocates.

I hope someone in the White House is at this very minute asking "why not a real fence," and refusing to accept nonsense answers about symbolism in a time of war.

If an when the fence around the White House is taken down, voters will start believing invirtual fences. Don't ask them to accept absurdity as policy. Click Here for Full Article

The Psychomyopic Democrats

Exactly as I see it, and always have. You will never have to ask "why?" again. Their motives are naked to the eyes of all who choose to see, which makes the Drive-by/Antique/MSM media so dangerous. The cloak of sincerity has been draped upon them for too long, and the veil of legitimacy. It is time they were lifted, once and for all...T
For several months, I have felt like the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes. Standing in the middle of a crowd of my elders and betters, watching the current political spectacle, I have been waiting for someone to say the obvious, waiting in vain until I feel compelled to blurt it out myself.

Here goes: “Many Democrats want the US to fail in Iraq!” I don’t mean that they think we’ll fail—they want us to. They want a big embarrassing collapse of US military and political policy in Iraq and will do whatever they can to make it happen. There, I’ve said it and I feel much better.

That doesn’t mean that they are traitors, taking bribes from al Qaeda, or prepared to jeopardize their country’s welfare to advance their careers. Not all of them, at least. There are some prominent Democrats who are morally so far gone that they may just possibly think that way. (After all, a person who can think up Travelgate is capable of any infamy.)
But the vast majority of Democrats think of themselves as loyal Americans and a polygraph would show that they honestly believe it.

The neural pathways inside their heads run something like this:

• The best thing for the United States would be for the Democratic party to come back into power.

• A really embarrassing failure in Iraq would tip next year’s election toward the Democrats.

• Therefore, a failure in Iraq would be good for the USA.

Take another issue, illegal immigrants. I contend that, if for no other reason than homeland security, it is essential that we seal our borders against illegal immigrants and expel the ones we have now. The reason behind the Democratic party’s insistent call for amnesty for all illegal immigrants has nothing to do with compassion; the syllogism is rather:

• The best thing for the United States would be for the Democratic party to come back into power.

• Illegal Hispanic immigrants, if naturalized, would vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

• Therefore, the naturalization of illegal immigrants would be good for the USA.

To explain this peculiar logic, we must look to the emerging field of mental ophthalmology, which describes the aberrations of what Hamlet called “the mind’s eye.”

Blurring the Mind’s Eye

One such aberration is psychomyopia, or mental nearsightedness. Like most politicians in most parties in most countries of the world, these Democrats cannot see beyond the next election. Issues such as the fate of our nation, the fate of the Iraqi people, and the success or failure of Islamic terrorism are vague blurry background features that they cannot discern.. The only thing their brains can focus on is the nearby goal of getting into power and staying there.

The Democrats are not alone in this aberration, of course. Psychomyopia is a widespread affliction. Republicans are sometimes just as bad when they are out of office or with regard to certain topics that will not be discussed here. It flourishes in all kinds of settings.

Bureaucrats and (if you’ll pardon the double misnomer) civil servants are often so preoccupied with career survival that they cannot see even the most urgent assigned tasks in any other light. Journalists can be so obsessed with publishing a scoop that they are oblivious to the harm they may cause by doing so. And let’s face it, dear reader, haven’t you and I occasionally been guilty of similar myopias?

But psychomyopia can be a relatively mild aberration, due to stupidity and shortsightedness. It is often not culpable because “they know not what they do.”

It is even occasionally curable, not by glasses but by patient explanation. A notable literary example of a cure is described by Robert Louis Stevenson in “Father Damien”:

…he had originally intended to lay out [the money] entirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully and revised the list… I was struck by the fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced. I may here tell you that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the father listened as usual with “perfect good-nature and perfect obstinacy”; but at the last, when he was persuaded — “Yes,” said he, “I am very much obliged to you; you have done me a service; it would have been a theft.”

It is rare, but it does happen. And it attests to the shortsighted honesty of at least some psychomyopics.

The symptoms of psychomyopia are easily confused with those of psychoglaucoma, or tunnel vision—a preoccupation with one aspect of a situation, coupled with a willful refusal to consider certain other aspects. As in physical ophthalmology, the latter is much more serious and (along with psychoastereopsis – failure to perceive depth) one of the few aberrations of the mind’s eye that can twist a soul into something evil.

Psychoglaucoma is culpable because it perverts the essence of free will. As Aquinas and others have pointed out, we are not free to refrain from choosing an obvious good or rejecting an obvious evil. Our freedom consists in deciding to ignore certain aspects of the choice—to avert our eyes from factors we don’t wish to see and confine our attention to the rest.

An intelligent and just man forces himself to see all aspects of a problem and therefore chooses the good. A psychomyopic cannot see some aspects but chooses as best he can. But a victim of psychoglaucoma chooses evil by seeing only what he wants to see and avoiding what he doesn’t want to see
The Bible provides us an example of psychoglaucoma, the elders in the story of Susannah, who

…suppressed their consciences; they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven, and did not keep in mind just judgments. [emphasis mine].

I remember a confrontation between pro-abortion and anti-abortion demonstrators, on a street in East Los Angeles some thirty years ago. One of the pro-life demonstrators held up poster showing a large picture of a baby-like fetus. He was surrounded by pro-choice demonstrators who were trying to cover up his poster with theirs—they didn’t want to look at it! Later, at a rally, pro-life advocate Susan McMilllan was asked about initiating a dialogue with pro-choice leaders.

“It doesn’t do any good”, she replied, “they know what they are doing and refuse to discuss it.”

Like the corresponding optical aberration, psychoglaucoma is a slow progressive disease. You develop it by first ignoring a few tiny unpleasant details and then, over the course of several years, you pile one self-deception on top of another until, without conscious dishonesty, you can be utterly oblivious to whatever you don’t want to see.
The Psychomyopic Democrats

"The News Media"...(gag, heave...)

...Uh huh...ok..."Good Night, and Good Luck"...yeah, right...T
I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.
"Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.
"Oh, no, no," he said. "Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news."
"So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."
He quickly replied, "No, then it would be biased."
I have been closely acquainted with newsroom cultures for more than 30 years, and I recognize the attitude. Only liberals can see the world clearly. Conservatives are prevented by their warped and ungenerous views from recognizing the world as it is. Click here for full article

How do you Debate a Compulsive Liar?

Starting with the spark kindled by the title here, the author brings clarity of focus to the frustration we feel when being force-fed "Bush lied, people died" and "No blood for oil" etc. This writer (Ronald Wieck) could be with us for a long time, indeed. Great style, impeccable insight, highly disciplined in focus. I'm re-printing the whole piece because excerpting his writing would be like trying to paraphrase Churchill. Once he disposes of the kooks, the author devastates Senator Kennedy, the left, and the MSM/drive-by media's dismissal of Chappaquiddick with glorious and indisputable finality...T
Whose Chappaquiddick was Chappaquiddick?
If jesting Pilate would not stay for an answer to his famous question, he owed it to himself to hang around long enough to check out a certain website, where he would surely have discovered what truth isn't. The Huffington Post is the sort of place kids used to call a nuthouse. For lefties at once swollen with their Weltschmerz, aggrieved, yearning for a more sensitive time when anti-American atrocities go unpunished, and sniggering, affecting knowledge and sophistication they simply don't possess, it's a watering hole.
They congregate there to lie about George Bush and Dick Cheney. A single theme is endlessly reworked, without logic or evidentiary reasoning ever intruding on the monotony of the variations: Bush and Co. are liars. Simplistic and essentially dishonest, it has to be hammered home relentlessly. That requires sacrificing even the most minimal standards of objectivity on the altar of the one transcendent liberal truth, a truth so nebulous and elusive that its exact nature continues to baffle taxonomists.
Not that any of the regular contributors are losing sleep. After all, Arianna Huffington, patron saint of apostates, was recently a conservative pundit. Following her husband's defeat in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat, she jettisoned him, along with all of her previously-avowed principles, and remade herself overnight, Madonna-style, as a liberal pundit. Deeply held convictions, for one who has been initiated into the cult of The Anointed, are so vulgar.
The spectacle of a partisan of the right saying nasty things about the left is guaranteed to induce yawns. Each side routinely accuses of the other of lying (the left does little else), and nobody pays attention, except the silly people whose job is to get themselves all hot and bothered. Well, there's something to that, but allow me to advance a proposition.
Confrontations between liars and honest souls tend to benefit the liars.
The very act of exchanging identical-sounding charges establishes for the undiscerning public, i.e., most voters, a qualitative equivalence. A real problem arises when one side is reality-based, while the other relies heavily on falsehood and distortion. In the absence of critical thinking skills, it is impossible to tell the knights from the knaves. And The Huffington Post is crawling with knaves.
Finding them is as challenging as finding beer cans at a softball game. You might be legally blind, but you'd still trip over your share. Just to take a random stab, here's a notice culled from the Des Moines Register. Far-left blowhard Tom Harkin has decided that the recent violence in Iraq constitutes a civil war. Stop the presses! Democrats have been praying for a civil war for three years and, to their keen disappointment, they don't have one yet. Can you guess what Harkin's solution is? "The senator, an opponent of the war, said the only solution to the surge of sectarian violence is [fanfare, please] to begin withdrawing U.S. forces." What's the Senator's rush? C'mon, all together now: "In order to extricate ourselves from the quagmire there."
Propaganda has to be repetitive to be effective, and it doesn't get more drearily, mind-numbingly predictable than this. But every so often, just when you thought you've heard everything--when you're certain that the limits of shameless effrontery have been reached--along comes something of such surpassing moral idiocy that it doubles you over like a Joe Frazier left hook to the liver. You're left gasping: They can't possibly be going there.
In the wake of Dick Cheney's accidental shooting of his friend Harry Whittington, a loony-left blogger on the Huffington Post, one using the name R.J. Eskow, wondered if the incident was "Cheney's Chappaquiddick." Honest to God.
Now, where to begin? The temptation is to try to say everything that cries out to be said all at once. We'll let Eskow set the stage:

Tucker Carlson confronted me on "The Situation" tonight about the fact that Willeford's husband was apparently on the ranch at the time of the incident. It seems that he and others must think my comparison of the Whittington shooting and Chappaquiddick must be all about sex.

Confused? How on earth does sex figure in the shooting accident? Actually, it doesn't figure one tiny bit. Mr. Eskow, seeker of truth that he is, fabricated this angle out of whole cloth. Two women not married to either Cheney or Whittington were members of the hunting party. Their husbands were aware; there is not the faintest hint of any sort of impropriety. Don't waste any indignation here--our boy is just getting warmed up.

There were more important factors than sex behind my Chappaquiddick analogy. (That analogy seems to drive conservatives insane, by the way. The hate mail and threats I've received are beyond anything I've ever seen. I guess the word's been such a treasured icon of hate for them that the possible loss of it drives them into a frenzy.)

I suppose there would have to be more important factors, as sex is a nonexistent one here. Clearly, a very sleazy mind, glutted with party politics to the exclusion of all other thoughts and feelings produced that innuendo. And please note the implication that conservatives who resent Teddy must be harboring an irrational hatred.

...It's about power, drinking, irresponsibility, and dishonesty. If there was no romance going on, the issues are still the same"

All right, maybe the guy is simply pulling our legs. By a show of hands, how many people out there out there can think of a mildly significant difference between the two Chappaquiddicks?
The very first order of business is to state for the record that in Teddy Kennedy's Chappaquiddick, a.k.a. "Chappaquiddick," a real, flesh-and-blood woman died. By sharp contrast, Harry Whittington received immediate medical attention and was whisked off to a hospital.
No, that's not quite sufficient. We need to review how that woman died. Very briefly, omitting all speculation about Teddy's amorous intentions, the young woman, a Kennedy staffer named Mary Jo Kopechne, had the misfortune to be his passenger when he drove the car off a bridge. Somehow, he managed to extricate himself and swim to safety. She remained trapped in a pocket of air--for who knows how long--and eventually drowned.
This next part should be underlined: The Conscience of the Democratic Party did not attempt to alert anyone to her plight. He went home and met with two of his advisors the following day to map out a strategy to a) obstruct justice and b) preserve his political viability. He didn't report the accident until after it was discovered ten hours later.
Please reread the preceding paragraph several times. Committing it to memory wouldn't be a bad idea.
Ask a liberal/leftist why he, or more incredibly, she isn't horrified, revolted, appalled by behavior that can best be described as horrifying, revolting, appalling, and you're likely to hear a recitation of Teddy's legislative accomplishments.

"No, really, he saved himself and let her slowly run out of air and drown!"
"Well, he's accomplished a lot of good things"

(You might want to restrain yourself from grabbing the zombie by the shoulders and shaking vigorously.)

"Do you hear me? He left a woman, still alive, in a submerged car, got himself to shore, AND WENT HOME! He didn't think to pound on the nearest door or yell for help. He didn't do what almost every human on the planet would have done without a moment's hesitation!"

No, they don't care. They don't care even slightly. The voters of Massachusetts, to their everlasting shame, re-elect him every six years. And don't fall for the myth that Chappaquiddick cost Teddy his birthright, the Presidency of the United States. When he announced his challenge to incumbent Jimmy Carter back in 1980, preliminary polls showed him with a huge lead. The born-again Jimmuh waged one of his characteristic slash-and-burn, no-blow-is-too-low campaigns, savaging his opponent and completing the job begun by Roger Mudd: the exposure of Kennedy as one the dumbest men ever to sit in the Senate. Voters didn't reject Teddy's morals. They simply found him unfit for the office.
Purely as an exercise, try to imagine something Teddy could do, short of murder, that would damage him. After giving it your best shot, ask yourself if what you've conjured up is worse than what he did, bearing in mind that he wins easily each time he runs. Eskow dissembles:

"It's about character. It matters."

Character means nothing to a morally tone-deaf fraud willing to stoop to anything to smear politicians whose policies he disapproves of. Everybody pays lip service to the notion that character matters, so nobody seriously ponders the question of why it should. How heavily would you weight character and integrity if you were a voter in the 1972 presidential election? For all his whiny sanctimoniousness, George McGovern had a decided edge over Tricky Dick. Would you, therefore, vote to install in the White House someone who had a terrific shot at losing the Cold War for the West? I confess that wrestling with this question makes me extremely uncomfortable. I will insist, however, that lines must be drawn somewhere.
Teddy Kennedy left Mary Jo Kopechne to die on a night in 1969. Over a third of a century has passed without anyone elucidating the ideological component in the tragedy. What is right or left about condemning behavior that is so utterly beyond the pale? Massachusetts is the bluest of blue states: Are there no other reflexively anti-military socialists who are capable of representing it?
In the most bizarre two sentences of his frighteningly twisted blog--always assuming that whole thing is not merely a very dark satire--Eskow writes:

“Ted Kennedy eventually came clean on his accident, and by all by all reports he’s straightened his life out. All of our leaders should do the same.”

Yes, yes, I know: Heaven help us if our leaders do the same. But for anyone who doesn’t know, there is the magnificent essay “Ted Kennedy on the Rocks,” which appears in the collection of Michael Kelly’s work, Things Worth Fighting For (Penguin Books 2004). Kelly’s untimely death in Iraq deprived the world of an elegant stylist and a good man.

My submission to the Understatement of the Century Contest is: Ted Kennedy has not come clean on his “accident” nor has he quite straightened his life out.
Click here for full article