It turns out that Joe Biden’s years-long pattern of charitable giving is so low a percentage of his income that I can’t even manage the right number of zeroes after 0.0. According to Byron York, this is how the numbers broke down the year Biden declared $120 in charitable giving to the IRS:
To take Biden’s worst year, 1999, one percent of his adjusted gross income would have been $2,100. One half of one percent would have been $1,050. One quarter of one percent would have been $525. One eighth of one percent would have been $262. And one sixteenth of one percent would have been $131 — still a bit more than the Bidens gave.
Joe Biden and American Charity
Biden may explain this by pointing out that he gives at the office. His Senate office, that is. He’s giving somone else's money, taxpayer money, but he gives.
Isn’t that good enough?
The Left is going to be sorely tempted to try to dig up a similar poverty of charity in the Todd and Sarah Palin household, but that will be just another cigar exploding in the media’s face. If I know my evangelicals, her branch believes in tithing, which, strictly applied, starts at 10%–and that's 10% of gross income, not net. Had Biden done that in 1999, he would have donated at least $21,000, instead of $120.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Jihadists Threaten Paul McCartney
From the UK's Sunday Express today:WE’LL KILL SIR PAUL IF HE PLAYS ISRAEL
Sunday September 14,2008
Dennis Rice
________________________________________
SIR Paul McCartney has been threatened that he will be the target of suicide bombers unless he abandons plans to play his first concert in Israel.
Self-styled preacher of hate Omar Bakri claimed the former Beatle’s decision to take part in the Jewish state’s 60th anniversary celebrations had made him an enemy of all Muslims.
Sources said Sir Paul was shocked but refused to be intimidated.
In an interview with Israeli media yesterday he said: “I was approached by different groups and political bodies who asked me not to come here. I refused. I do what I think and I have many friends who support Israel.”
Sir Paul, 65, should have gone to Israel with the Beatles in 1965 but they were barred by the Jewish nation’s government over fears they would corrupt young people.
Yesterday a number of websites described him as an infidel and suggested he was going to Israel only because of the reported £2.3m fee for the one-off concert.
A message posted on one website said: “Shame on you Paul McCartney for day trippin’ to apartheid Israel” and vowed never to buy his music again.
Bakri, who made his weekly internet broadcast to fellow extremists from his home in Lebanon, where he has lived in exile since being banned from returning to Britain, said Sir Paul was “making more enemies than friends”.
Syrian-born Bakri, 48, went on: “I heard today that the pop star Paul McCartney is playing as a part of the celebrations.
“If you speak about the holocaust and its authenticity never being proved historically in the way the Jewish community portray it, people will arrest you. People will you say you should not speak like this. Yet they go and celebrate the anniversary of 60 years of what?
“Instead of supporting the people of Palestine in their suffering, McCartney is celebrating the atrocities of the occupiers. The one who is under occupation is supposed to be getting the help.
“And so I believe for Paul McCartney, what he is doing really is creating more enemies than friends.”
Explaining his comments, Bakri told the Sunday Express: “Our enemy’s friend is our enemy.
“Thus Paul McCartney is the enemy of every Muslim. We have what we call ‘sacrifice’ operatives who will not stand by while he joins in a celebration of their oppression.
“If he values his life Mr McCartney must not come to Israel. He will not be safe there. The sacrifice operatives will be waiting for him.”
Lawyer Anjem Choudary, who last week chaired a meeting in London at which extremists claimed the next 9/11-style atrocity would be in Britain, said Sir Paul had allowed himself to become a propaganda tool for Israel.
He added: “Muslims have every right to be angry at Paul McCartney. How would the world react if he wanted to have a
concert in occupied Kashmir?
“They would not allow it to happen but because it is Israel he can play. A country which, as the celebration indicates did not exist 60 years ago, only exists thanks to stealing and occupying another country’s lands.” Yesterday the comments drew condemnation from Palestinian sources and outsiders.
Omar Barghouti, of The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, described the threat as “deplorable”.
Patrick Mercer, the Conservative MP for Newark and a former Shadow Security Minister, said: “One could dismiss Bakri as a ranting extremist but history has shown that he has an ability to twist minds, so his comments should not be underestimated.
“If Sir Paul McCartney wants to play at the 60th anniversary then it is the worst form of illiberalism for Omar Bakri to restrict the artist’s freedom in this way.”
A spokesman for Sir Paul declined to comment on the threat, saying: “Paul’s Friendship First concert is about his music. Paul’s is a message of peace.”
Tickets for the concert range from £70 to £230.
Last night Sir Paul performed his first concert in the Ukraine, playing to tens of thousands in the capital Kiev.
#
Speaking of which, remember this from the concert after 9/11?
Freedom
(Paul McCartney)
This is my right, a right given by God
To live a free life, to live in Freedom
We talkin' about Freedom
Talkin' bout Freedom
I will fight, for the right
To live in Freedom
Anyone, who wants to take it away
Will have to answer, Cause this is my right
We talkin' about Freedom
Talkin' bout Freedom
I will fight, for the right
To live in Freedom, ah yeah, c’mon now...
You talkin' about Freedom
Were talkin' bout Freedom
I will fight, for the right
To live in Freedom
Everybody talkin' bout Freedom
Talkin' bout Freedom
I will fight, for the right
#
Looks as if he's going to get his chance, God bless him.
How About 'Lipstick on a Pig that Ate the ACORN?'
ACORN is in trouble. Again. ("Bad voter applications found").
According to the Detroit Free Press article that ran today:
Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.
The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN's Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.
"There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State's Office. "And it appears to be widespread."
But don’t worry. It will all blow over. And Obama’s name won’t be dragged into it.
ACORN is America’s foremost perpetrator of voter fraud, as well as being the very definition of that hazy concept of “community organization,” as in, “I was a community organizer.”
ACORN has also been called, with good reason, “arguably the most politically radical large-scale activist group in the country.” (“Inside Obama’s Acorn”).
ACORN has a pattern of voter fraud going back years, and across at least a dozen states. ("ACORN’s Voter Fraud in Ohio is Part of Larger Pattern").
According to Michelle Malkin,
Last July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, they flipped through phone books for names to use on the forms, including “Leon Spinks,” “Frekkie Magoal” and “Fruto Boy Crispila.” Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty in October. A King County prosecutor called ACORN’s criminal sabotage “an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls.” (The ACORN Obama knows).
There’s plenty more information out there on ACORN, and the very real, and very close ACORN/Obama link. You should take a look at these, too, if you have the time.
ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities
Acorn Squash
Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign
Basically, ACORN is to Community Organizing what the sun is to The Solar System.
And as we all know, the job description of “community organizer” has been in the news a lot lately, as it is Obama’s biggest qualification to become Leader of the Free World.
But read this article in the Free Press, and see if you can see where Obama’s mentioned at all as a prominent community organizer--heck, the most prominent community organizer --in ACORN's history.
And isn’t it odd ACORN’s just been busted, again, in Michigan, of all places. Could it have anything to do with Michigan being a state that both parties in this presidential election know is very close, and very much in play as Election Day approaches?
ACORN’s reaction to being confronted with thousands of duplicate voter registrations in advance of the November elections?
Instead, the Free Press is letting ACORN play the whole thing like a bad case of the sloppies.
"We certainly do our best to keep the duplications as low as possible, so we'll have to evaluate what's happening here," says ACORN spokesman, David Lagstein.
This is like Tony Soprano saying they do their best to keep corruption out of business, so they’ll certainly have to evaluate all these complaints about racketeering, money laundering, and murder.
According to the Detroit Free Press article that ran today:
Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.
The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has a large voter registration program among its many social service programs. ACORN's Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.
"There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State's Office. "And it appears to be widespread."
But don’t worry. It will all blow over. And Obama’s name won’t be dragged into it.
ACORN is America’s foremost perpetrator of voter fraud, as well as being the very definition of that hazy concept of “community organization,” as in, “I was a community organizer.”
ACORN has also been called, with good reason, “arguably the most politically radical large-scale activist group in the country.” (“Inside Obama’s Acorn”).
ACORN has a pattern of voter fraud going back years, and across at least a dozen states. ("ACORN’s Voter Fraud in Ohio is Part of Larger Pattern").
According to Michelle Malkin,
Last July, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, they flipped through phone books for names to use on the forms, including “Leon Spinks,” “Frekkie Magoal” and “Fruto Boy Crispila.” Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty in October. A King County prosecutor called ACORN’s criminal sabotage “an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls.” (The ACORN Obama knows).
There’s plenty more information out there on ACORN, and the very real, and very close ACORN/Obama link. You should take a look at these, too, if you have the time.
ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities
Acorn Squash
Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign
Basically, ACORN is to Community Organizing what the sun is to The Solar System.
And as we all know, the job description of “community organizer” has been in the news a lot lately, as it is Obama’s biggest qualification to become Leader of the Free World.
But read this article in the Free Press, and see if you can see where Obama’s mentioned at all as a prominent community organizer--heck, the most prominent community organizer --in ACORN's history.
And isn’t it odd ACORN’s just been busted, again, in Michigan, of all places. Could it have anything to do with Michigan being a state that both parties in this presidential election know is very close, and very much in play as Election Day approaches?
ACORN’s reaction to being confronted with thousands of duplicate voter registrations in advance of the November elections?
Instead, the Free Press is letting ACORN play the whole thing like a bad case of the sloppies.
"We certainly do our best to keep the duplications as low as possible, so we'll have to evaluate what's happening here," says ACORN spokesman, David Lagstein.
This is like Tony Soprano saying they do their best to keep corruption out of business, so they’ll certainly have to evaluate all these complaints about racketeering, money laundering, and murder.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
The Fungibility of Hate
As I suspected, the recent derangement over Sarah Palin confirms my belief that what we have all witnessed since 2000 of the malady known as "Bush Derangement Syndrome" is, in fact, transferable. Now that George W. Bush will soon be passing from the political scene, his bitterest enemies are already transferring their hatred for him to Sara Palin.
Which proves that the cause of the hatred is not George W. Bush, nor never has been. Rather, it is subjective, originating within his enemies themselves.
And though they don't know it, it isn't George W. Bush nor Sarah Palin they really hate.
Which proves that the cause of the hatred is not George W. Bush, nor never has been. Rather, it is subjective, originating within his enemies themselves.
And though they don't know it, it isn't George W. Bush nor Sarah Palin they really hate.
Mark Steyn on the Origins of Tolerating Intolerance
Mark Steyn gave this brief history of the blunt instrument of “Islamophobia” in a speech at Hillsdale College in March, as recorded in Imprimis Magazine:
Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading, “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 911 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.
Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool.” The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “Push off” (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) “or I’ll arrest you.” Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reactions, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely, “There is only one person here who is in any danger of dying.”
And that's the way it's gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant “Islamophobia,” it's usually only the other party who is “in any danger of dying.”
Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading, “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 911 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.
Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various “Muslim community leaders” weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to “play it cool.” The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to “Push off” (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) “or I’ll arrest you.” Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. “I well understand the devout Muslims’ reactions, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for,” said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely, “There is only one person here who is in any danger of dying.”
And that's the way it's gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant “Islamophobia,” it's usually only the other party who is “in any danger of dying.”
Bridge to Muslims, or Bridge Club Meeting?
On last Tuesday Obama sent a couple of his staffers to Southfield, to meet with Arab Americans “to shore up support from a pivotal community in a key swing state.” (“Obama campaign meets with Arab Americans”).
But he didn’t show up himself. Never does. Obama so far hasn’t shown up to meet with a group of Michigan’s Arabs yet in person. Last year, he sent only an adviser to a conference in Dearborn of the Arab American Institute. ("The Arab American Institute's Hezbollah Shish Kebabs").
Then, when Obama addressed 20,000 supporters at Joe Louis this June, he pointedly failed to meet with local Muslims leaders. ("Obama addresses diverse Detroit crowd").
He did meet with Hezbollah-supporter Imam Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, but he did so secretly, miles outside of Dearborn, and well under the radar, which was easy because local media kept radar turned off anyway.
So how many Arab Americans showed up in Southfield to meet with Obama’s “high-level campaign figures” last week?
Thirty.
In southeastern Michigan. In the the Muslim capital of North America. In a banquet hall that can hold ten times that number.
Thirty. A far cry from Berlin’s 200,000 Obama-Jugend, or even the 84,000 shoehorned into Invesco Field for Barack’s coronation.
According to my calculations, the Southfield turnout makes about 15 Arab Americans per high-level campaign figure.
Looks like Obama’s bridge to the Muslim community is turning out to be a real, (sorry), bridge to nowhere.
At least the Alaskan bridge to nowhere was aimed at an island with at least 50 people on it.
According to the Arab American News, “The meeting was cut short after a limited number of questions from the group because of time constraints as [Obama foreign policy advisor] Rice scrambled to squeeze in time with women's groups during her trip to Michigan.”
Translation: the crickets were chirping at this bomb. So foreign policy advisor Ms. Rice slung her oversized purse and said, “Thanks for coming out everyone! Gotta go talk about abortion now with the real voters!”
Four years ago, when ripping out the American eagle carpet from the Oval Office was still just a glint in Michelle Obama’s eye, Barack said this during his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention:
"If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. 'E pluribus unum.' Out of many, one."
The bit about the Arab roundup was pure Obama-brand horsehit, we all know. The operative word in that first-line’s bad knockoff of Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath was that little preposition, “if.” As in, “if there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process.”
As a longtime resident of Dearborn who comes and goes to work each day through the heart of Arab East Dearborn, I am extremely touchy at casual charges that the streets of our fair city are blocked night and day with black Marias hauling off entire extended families to incognito detention, NKVD-style.
But, at least in 2004, Obama was willing to lie to get the Muslim voters to turn out for John Kerry. Media fact-checking of keynote convention speeches of non-candidates is much slacker, and Obama knew it.
Now they do check every fact, and Obama no longer has a thing to say about whole families being muscled into paddy wagons and disappeared. I wonder why?
He’s still willing to fib, that hasn’t changed. But the level of scrutiny of what he says has been heightened exponentially. He can’t just say anything now, because folks are going to check it out.
And he definitely can’t come to the capital of Muslim America, Dearborn, and makes statements about Arab American families being rounded up without attorneys or due process, because he’s talking about something that doesn’t happen, and never happened here.
Never.
And if he ever dared to say those things were happening, especially if he said it to media cameras arm in arm with Imam Qazwini or Dawud Walid, the stink wouldn’t clear up until the media---even Barack’s own private media at MSNBC and the New York Times--had finally gotten to the bottom of the whole Islamophobic “siege” myth once and for all--even if they didn’t want to get to the bottom of it.
That’s just what happens during presidential campaigns. Nowadays, when fights get picked over alleged facts, those fights don’t end till some actual facts coms out and somebody says “uncle.”
That’s why Dan Rather’s gone. That’s why John Kerry, in spite of the still continuing slander of the facts brought out by the Swift Boat Veterans, was shown up in 2004 as the opportunistic chickenshit that he was. That’s why Sarah Palin is no longer being accused of being the grandmother of her own baby, Trig.
And Obama doesn’t want the truth about the disappearing Arab families to come out, either, for the bald reason that there are no disappearing Arab American families.
But there are a lot of lying Islamic leaders who keep telling their constituents that there are.
And you know who else doesn’t want the truth of that coming out? CAIR, or the ADC, or Osama Siblani at the Arab American News.
None of them wants CNN or Frontline to do a documentary entitled “Islamophobia: Fact or Fiction?” because even two days of serious investigation, by even the most partisan reporters, will reveal what all of us in Dearborn have known all along--that the whole Islamophobic-siege thing is nothing more than a wicked slander meant to silence criticism of jihadism in America, and to intimidate law enforcement from pursuing evidence of terrorist links wherever it leads.
CAIR would be finished without the myth of Islamophobia and American Muslims under “siege,” but they need it to remain a low, throbbing drumbeat that keeps people on edge, not a splashy front-page exposé. It has to work almost unrecognized in the back of the head, without ever quite making people stop to find out where the sound is coming from. Unexamined, it keeps lots of half-informed Americans convinced they’ve actually witnessed “Islamophobia,” when they’re actually only showing symptoms of having the term repeated into their subconscious thousands of times. (The same subliminal technique has convinced 45 million Americans that they personally heard Bush say Iraq was an “imminent threat,” and makes them swear they watched the speech where he said he was deposing Saddam’s regime because “God told me to.”).
Once anyone actually examines the issue of the siege on Muslims in America, they find there’s nothing to it. So CAIR doesn’t want it examined. And as for Obama, he just doesn’t want to get busted repeating unsubstantiated CAIR talking points.
Because Obama’s under the bright lights now, he can no longer afford to say the ridiculous things he could say to the Democrat faithful in 2004. He can no longer compare himself, Tom Joad-like, with disappeared Arab American families buried deep in the Bush/Cheney gulag, because there is no gulag, and there’s no family in there to find. And he knows it. He always knew it.
And that's why his current "fact sheet,' the one that even his Arab supporters rely on, doesn’t mention a word about Islamophobia, families being rounded up, or even Arab Americans.
Instead, it cites some statistics about arrest rates for blacks and Hispanics, and prattles about another racial myth, Jena, and recaps the history of the black civil rights movement. It doesn’t even pretend to address Islamophobia, because it can’t seriously do so, and still stand up to scrutiny as a fact sheet.
So both parties have a problem. Obama can’t give CAIR and Qazwini and the other Islamist leaders what they want, which is a platform for their accusations of Islamophobia, nor will he risk his campaign to promise them that, if elected, he'll bestow on their kind law enforcement immunity under an Obama Justice Department. In return, Obama can’t see hazarding his fragile campaign for the sake of winning Arab American voters.
But he didn’t show up himself. Never does. Obama so far hasn’t shown up to meet with a group of Michigan’s Arabs yet in person. Last year, he sent only an adviser to a conference in Dearborn of the Arab American Institute. ("The Arab American Institute's Hezbollah Shish Kebabs").
Then, when Obama addressed 20,000 supporters at Joe Louis this June, he pointedly failed to meet with local Muslims leaders. ("Obama addresses diverse Detroit crowd").
He did meet with Hezbollah-supporter Imam Qazwini of the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, but he did so secretly, miles outside of Dearborn, and well under the radar, which was easy because local media kept radar turned off anyway.
So how many Arab Americans showed up in Southfield to meet with Obama’s “high-level campaign figures” last week?
Thirty.
In southeastern Michigan. In the the Muslim capital of North America. In a banquet hall that can hold ten times that number.
Thirty. A far cry from Berlin’s 200,000 Obama-Jugend, or even the 84,000 shoehorned into Invesco Field for Barack’s coronation.
According to my calculations, the Southfield turnout makes about 15 Arab Americans per high-level campaign figure.
Looks like Obama’s bridge to the Muslim community is turning out to be a real, (sorry), bridge to nowhere.
At least the Alaskan bridge to nowhere was aimed at an island with at least 50 people on it.
According to the Arab American News, “The meeting was cut short after a limited number of questions from the group because of time constraints as [Obama foreign policy advisor] Rice scrambled to squeeze in time with women's groups during her trip to Michigan.”
Translation: the crickets were chirping at this bomb. So foreign policy advisor Ms. Rice slung her oversized purse and said, “Thanks for coming out everyone! Gotta go talk about abortion now with the real voters!”
Four years ago, when ripping out the American eagle carpet from the Oval Office was still just a glint in Michelle Obama’s eye, Barack said this during his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention:
"If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper - that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. 'E pluribus unum.' Out of many, one."
The bit about the Arab roundup was pure Obama-brand horsehit, we all know. The operative word in that first-line’s bad knockoff of Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath was that little preposition, “if.” As in, “if there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process.”
As a longtime resident of Dearborn who comes and goes to work each day through the heart of Arab East Dearborn, I am extremely touchy at casual charges that the streets of our fair city are blocked night and day with black Marias hauling off entire extended families to incognito detention, NKVD-style.
But, at least in 2004, Obama was willing to lie to get the Muslim voters to turn out for John Kerry. Media fact-checking of keynote convention speeches of non-candidates is much slacker, and Obama knew it.
Now they do check every fact, and Obama no longer has a thing to say about whole families being muscled into paddy wagons and disappeared. I wonder why?
He’s still willing to fib, that hasn’t changed. But the level of scrutiny of what he says has been heightened exponentially. He can’t just say anything now, because folks are going to check it out.
And he definitely can’t come to the capital of Muslim America, Dearborn, and makes statements about Arab American families being rounded up without attorneys or due process, because he’s talking about something that doesn’t happen, and never happened here.
Never.
And if he ever dared to say those things were happening, especially if he said it to media cameras arm in arm with Imam Qazwini or Dawud Walid, the stink wouldn’t clear up until the media---even Barack’s own private media at MSNBC and the New York Times--had finally gotten to the bottom of the whole Islamophobic “siege” myth once and for all--even if they didn’t want to get to the bottom of it.
That’s just what happens during presidential campaigns. Nowadays, when fights get picked over alleged facts, those fights don’t end till some actual facts coms out and somebody says “uncle.”
That’s why Dan Rather’s gone. That’s why John Kerry, in spite of the still continuing slander of the facts brought out by the Swift Boat Veterans, was shown up in 2004 as the opportunistic chickenshit that he was. That’s why Sarah Palin is no longer being accused of being the grandmother of her own baby, Trig.
And Obama doesn’t want the truth about the disappearing Arab families to come out, either, for the bald reason that there are no disappearing Arab American families.
But there are a lot of lying Islamic leaders who keep telling their constituents that there are.
And you know who else doesn’t want the truth of that coming out? CAIR, or the ADC, or Osama Siblani at the Arab American News.
None of them wants CNN or Frontline to do a documentary entitled “Islamophobia: Fact or Fiction?” because even two days of serious investigation, by even the most partisan reporters, will reveal what all of us in Dearborn have known all along--that the whole Islamophobic-siege thing is nothing more than a wicked slander meant to silence criticism of jihadism in America, and to intimidate law enforcement from pursuing evidence of terrorist links wherever it leads.
CAIR would be finished without the myth of Islamophobia and American Muslims under “siege,” but they need it to remain a low, throbbing drumbeat that keeps people on edge, not a splashy front-page exposé. It has to work almost unrecognized in the back of the head, without ever quite making people stop to find out where the sound is coming from. Unexamined, it keeps lots of half-informed Americans convinced they’ve actually witnessed “Islamophobia,” when they’re actually only showing symptoms of having the term repeated into their subconscious thousands of times. (The same subliminal technique has convinced 45 million Americans that they personally heard Bush say Iraq was an “imminent threat,” and makes them swear they watched the speech where he said he was deposing Saddam’s regime because “God told me to.”).
Once anyone actually examines the issue of the siege on Muslims in America, they find there’s nothing to it. So CAIR doesn’t want it examined. And as for Obama, he just doesn’t want to get busted repeating unsubstantiated CAIR talking points.
Because Obama’s under the bright lights now, he can no longer afford to say the ridiculous things he could say to the Democrat faithful in 2004. He can no longer compare himself, Tom Joad-like, with disappeared Arab American families buried deep in the Bush/Cheney gulag, because there is no gulag, and there’s no family in there to find. And he knows it. He always knew it.
And that's why his current "fact sheet,' the one that even his Arab supporters rely on, doesn’t mention a word about Islamophobia, families being rounded up, or even Arab Americans.
Instead, it cites some statistics about arrest rates for blacks and Hispanics, and prattles about another racial myth, Jena, and recaps the history of the black civil rights movement. It doesn’t even pretend to address Islamophobia, because it can’t seriously do so, and still stand up to scrutiny as a fact sheet.
So both parties have a problem. Obama can’t give CAIR and Qazwini and the other Islamist leaders what they want, which is a platform for their accusations of Islamophobia, nor will he risk his campaign to promise them that, if elected, he'll bestow on their kind law enforcement immunity under an Obama Justice Department. In return, Obama can’t see hazarding his fragile campaign for the sake of winning Arab American voters.
Minnesota Charter Schools Train Pupils for the Future--(the Islamic Future)
Minnesota’s Islamic charter school, Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TiZA), is still asserting its independence from control by the state department of education, according to Katherine Kersten at the Minnesota Star Tribune. We've posted Kersten's reports about this Islamic academy situation before. (“Establishing Islam in Minnesota”; “Even ACLU-MN Sees the Problem in Minneapolis”). Now Kersten writes that discussions with the Minnesota Dept. of Ed to bring TiZA into compliance with legal prohibitons against publicly-funded charter schools endorsing religion have run into resistance:
TiZA officials have "taken a confrontational road" in discussions with the department, according to Deputy MDE Commissioner Chas Anderson, the department's No. 2 official.
Anderson says that the two sides have not yet reached an agreement on one key issue and that MDE will be closely monitoring TiZA's performance in future months.
TiZA is a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights, financed by taxpayers. Its students have scored well on standardized tests. But like all public schools, it may not encourage or endorse religion, or favor one religion over another.
A number of facts raise questions about TiZA on this score. Its executive director, Asad Zaman, is an imam, or Muslim religious leader. The school shares a building with a mosque and the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society, which the Chicago Tribune has described as the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood -- "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group."
Most of TiZA's students are Muslim, many from low-income immigrant families. The school breaks daily for prayer, its cafeteria serves halal food (permissible under Islamic law), and Arabic is a required subject.
School buses do not leave until after-school Muslim Studies classes, which many students attend, have ended for the day.
Read about it here: Storm brewing between state officials and TiZA school .
TiZA officials have "taken a confrontational road" in discussions with the department, according to Deputy MDE Commissioner Chas Anderson, the department's No. 2 official.
Anderson says that the two sides have not yet reached an agreement on one key issue and that MDE will be closely monitoring TiZA's performance in future months.
TiZA is a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights, financed by taxpayers. Its students have scored well on standardized tests. But like all public schools, it may not encourage or endorse religion, or favor one religion over another.
A number of facts raise questions about TiZA on this score. Its executive director, Asad Zaman, is an imam, or Muslim religious leader. The school shares a building with a mosque and the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society, which the Chicago Tribune has described as the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood -- "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group."
Most of TiZA's students are Muslim, many from low-income immigrant families. The school breaks daily for prayer, its cafeteria serves halal food (permissible under Islamic law), and Arabic is a required subject.
School buses do not leave until after-school Muslim Studies classes, which many students attend, have ended for the day.
Read about it here: Storm brewing between state officials and TiZA school .
Obama Picks Up Key Endorsements
“There is no doubt that Obama's sexist attitude will go down well with publicly-declared Islamic supporters such as Hamas' political guru Ahmed Yousef ("we hope he will win the election"), Louis Farrakhan ("this young man is the hope of the entire world"), and Libyan President Muamar Khadafi who said in his endorsement speech that "all the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for his success.”
--Vasko Kohlmayer at American Thinker.
Read all about it here.
--Vasko Kohlmayer at American Thinker.
Read all about it here.
Friday, September 12, 2008
'Obama's Muslim Outreach'
From the American Thinker:
Obama's Disturbing Muslim Outreach: Resigned but not Gone?
Peggy Shapiro
Obama's Muslim Outreach Coordinator, Mazen Asbahi, resigned in August after only ten days in his position, when it was revealed that he had ties to groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question is no longer about what kind of judgment was used in bringing Asbahi on a campaign that has been plague with questionable advisors and mentors, but whether Asbahi has actually left.
Asbahi's official stint on the Obama team ended when it came to light that he was one of six trustees of Allied Asset Advisors Funds, a subsidiary of "subsidiary of the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and an advisor to the Dow Jones Islamic Fund. Both NAIT and Dow Jones Islamic Fund fall under the umbrella of Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). NAIT, which owns nearly a third of all U.S. mosques and Muslim centers, many funded by the Saudi government, advocates a radical form of Islam. In fact, a Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that NAIT played an important role in the takeover of a Chicago-area mosque by Islamic fundamentalists who replaced the more moderate leaders. (Struggle for the soul of Islam; Hard-liners won battle for Bridgeview mosque," Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2004)
In a report annotated by almost 500 sources, the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report concludes that ""ISNA was created in the matrix of early organizations design to propagate Saudi/Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalism throughout the world... ISNA and its key leaders have a disturbing record of association with organizations and individuals that are accused and/or convicted of providing assistance to terrorist organizations as defined by the U.S State Department... The largest body of evidence concerning these associations relates to ISNA's support of the Palestinian terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad."
As with his other radical associations (William Ayers, Samantha Power, Reverend Wright), Mazen Asbahi may be quietly waiting behind the scenes to resume his place when the election is over. Investor's Business Daily reports that Asbahi "has not stopped working on behalf of Obama." They quote the "former" coordinator as saying that, "despite his official exit he was still "110%" behind Obama and that he was participating in campaign conference calls on Muslim outreach." Leaving the campaign was a "strategic decision," according to Asbahi.
This "strategic" decision brings to mind other similar strategic decisions by Obama. In an article How Barack Obama learned to love Israel, (The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007) his friend Ali Abunimah criticizes Obama's suddenly positive public expressions about Israel. Abunimah comes to understand Obama's strategy when the two men run into each other. "As he [Obama] came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, ‘Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.' He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy. "
Associates who unnerve, if not terrify, most Americans may be temporarily put aside for "strategic" campaign purposes, but who will be influencing the course of the nation if there is an Obama Whitehouse and the President is finally up front?
'Bush 7, Terrorists 0'
Bush 7, Terrorists 0
Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Morose that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage -- but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.
On Keith Olbermann's Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States "is proof that there is a God in heaven." Olbermann responded: "A supremely good point."
Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that's how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his "documentaries," so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore's morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.
Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes!
As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.
Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.
If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.
A year after the 9/11 attack, The New York Times' Frank Rich was carping about Bush's national security plans, saying we could judge Bush's war on terror by whether there was a major al-Qaida attack in 2003, which -- according to Rich -- would have been on al-Qaida's normal schedule.
Rich wrote: "Since major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough." ("Never Forget What?" New York Times, Sept. 14, 2002.)
There wasn't a major al-Qaida attack in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. Manifestly, liberals thought there would be: They announced a standard of success that they expected Bush to fail.
As Bush has said, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, the terrorists only have to be right one time. Bush has been right 100 percent of the time for seven years -- so much so that Americans have completely forgotten about the threat of Islamic terrorism.
For his thanks, President Bush has been the target of almost unimaginable calumnies -- the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for seniors who don't separate their recyclables properly. Compared to liberals' anger at Bush, there has always been something vaguely impersonal about their "anger" toward the terrorists.
By my count, roughly one in four books in print in the world at this very moment have the words "Bush" and "Lie" in their title. Barnes & Noble has been forced to add an "I Hate Bush" section. I don't believe there are as many anti-Hitler books.
Despite the fact that Hitler brought "change," promoted clean, energy-efficient mass transit by making the trains run on time, supported abortion for the non-master races, vastly expanded the power of the national government and was uniformly adored by college students and their professors, I gather that liberals don't like Hitler because they're constantly comparing him to Bush.
The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.
George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.
That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.
OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.
Ann Coulter
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Morose that there hasn't been another terrorist attack on American soil for seven long years, liberals were ecstatic when Hurricane Gustav was headed toward New Orleans during the Republican National Convention last week. The networks gave the hurricane plenty of breaking-news coverage -- but unfortunately it was Hurricane Katrina from 2005 they were covering.
On Keith Olbermann's Aug. 29 show on MSNBC, Michael Moore said the possibility of a Category 3 hurricane hitting the United States "is proof that there is a God in heaven." Olbermann responded: "A supremely good point."
Actually, Olbermann said that a few minutes later to some other idiotic point Moore had made, but that's how Moore would have edited the interview for one of his "documentaries," so I will, too. I would only add that Michael Moore's morbid obesity is proof that there is a Buddha.
Hurricane Gustav came and went without a hitch. What a difference a Republican governor makes!
As many have pointed out, the reason elected officials tend to neglect infrastructure projects, like reinforcing levees in New Orleans and bridges in Minneapolis, is that there's no glory when a bridge doesn't collapse. There are no round-the-clock news specials when the levees hold. You can't even name an overpass retrofitting project after yourself -- it just looks too silly. But everyone's taxes go up to pay for the reinforcements.
Preventing another terrorist attack is like that. There is no media coverage when another 9/11 doesn't happen. We can thank God that President George Bush didn't care about doing the safe thing for himself; he cared about keeping Americans safe. And he has, for seven years.
If Bush's only concern were about his approval ratings, like a certain impeached president I could name, he would not have fought for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq. He would not have resisted the howling ninnies demanding that we withdraw from Iraq, year after year. By liberals' own standard, Bush's war on terrorism has been a smashing, unimaginable success.
A year after the 9/11 attack, The New York Times' Frank Rich was carping about Bush's national security plans, saying we could judge Bush's war on terror by whether there was a major al-Qaida attack in 2003, which -- according to Rich -- would have been on al-Qaida's normal schedule.
Rich wrote: "Since major al-Qaida attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough." ("Never Forget What?" New York Times, Sept. 14, 2002.)
There wasn't a major al-Qaida attack in 2003. Nor in 2004, 2005, 2006 or 2007. Manifestly, liberals thought there would be: They announced a standard of success that they expected Bush to fail.
As Bush has said, we have to be right 100 percent of the time, the terrorists only have to be right one time. Bush has been right 100 percent of the time for seven years -- so much so that Americans have completely forgotten about the threat of Islamic terrorism.
For his thanks, President Bush has been the target of almost unimaginable calumnies -- the sort of invective liberals usually reserve for seniors who don't separate their recyclables properly. Compared to liberals' anger at Bush, there has always been something vaguely impersonal about their "anger" toward the terrorists.
By my count, roughly one in four books in print in the world at this very moment have the words "Bush" and "Lie" in their title. Barnes & Noble has been forced to add an "I Hate Bush" section. I don't believe there are as many anti-Hitler books.
Despite the fact that Hitler brought "change," promoted clean, energy-efficient mass transit by making the trains run on time, supported abortion for the non-master races, vastly expanded the power of the national government and was uniformly adored by college students and their professors, I gather that liberals don't like Hitler because they're constantly comparing him to Bush.
The ferocity of the left's attacks on Bush even scared many of his conservative allies into turning on him over the war in Iraq.
George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.
That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.
OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.
That's Palin 1, Moose 0
“If you wish to discourse with me,” Voltaire once said, “define your terms.”
Just so Governor Palin refused to let Charlie Gibson plop his loaded question on her about the “Bush Doctrine” without insisting he be very specific about what he had in mind. Naturally, the media has leapt upon her response (not much else to leap on, I guess), calling it proof that she had no idea what Gibson was talking about—which shows she is such a foreign-policy nincompoop that she must never be allowed within 20 kopecks of a Vladimir Putin. Writes the BBC:
“Governor Palin did seem rather hazy when asked whether she agreed with the Bush doctrine.
‘In what respect?’ she asked, without seeming to know that it was a reference to pre-emptive war.” (“A little of real Palin revealed”).
But that’s the whole point. Who said Gibson’s use of the expression, “the Bush doctrine,” “was a reference to pre-emptive war”? Why not understand it as a reference to other, less loaded aspects of what has been described, with greater or lesser accuracy (usually lesser), as the “Bush doctrine,” aspects such as refusing to “permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons,” or a commitment to supporting “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”?
("What about the Bush Doctrine?")
Or how about, as TIME magazine faintly praised it with faint damnation in 2006, by calling it “the foundation for a grand strategy to fight Islamic terrorists and rogue states by spreading democracy around the world and pre-empting gathering threats before they materialize.”
The official White House statement as to the Bush doctrine, in Spring 2002, summarized its goals as follows:
• champion aspirations for human dignity;
• strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism and work to prevent attacks against us and our friends;
• work with others to defuse regional conflicts;
• prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies, and our friends, with weapons of mass destruction;
• ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade;
• expand the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy;
• develop agendas for cooperative action with other main centers of global power; and
• transform America’s national security institutions to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century.
So then, these are things we don’t want our Vice President to agree with?
But in the mouths of the Left, and the media they control, the expression “Bush doctrine” has been co-opted to contain everything the Left has ever hated about Bush’s approach to international relations. And of course, everything they hate about that is a whole lot. Behold just some of what Mother Jones managed to squeeze into their explanation of the Bush Doctrine:
“The doctrine goes beyond the preemption theme sounded by President Bush in a West Point speech last June. Read beneath its kitchen-sink rhetoric and you see, in black and white, Bush codifying the unilateral treaty-busting moves of his first months in office -- his rejection of the Kyoto climate-change protocol, his cancellation of the ABM accord, his obstruction of the bioweapons treaty, and his flat withdrawal from participation in the International Criminal Court, to name only the most dramatic.” ("America's Age of Empire").
In the words of Salon.com, “the Bush doctrine is a supremely dangerous cocktail, an explosive blend of the arrogance of our uniquely powerful post-Cold War military strength laced with a mind-numbing fear of box-cutter-wielding maniacs”.
Then there’s John Edward’s version of the Bush doctrine. You remember Edwards: he was a VP candidate in 2004, and in the four years since then he still hasn't faced a particle of the Klieg light Sarah Palin's had to face in just the past 2 weeks--and that's in spite of his lying, his adultery, and the way he combs his hair. But back when Edwards was still considered a serious moral entity, (at least by the national press, who don't know any better), he airily dismissed not only the Bush doctrine, but the global terror war that led to so much of it, with this explanation:
“This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do....It's been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true.”
So when Sarah heard the question from Gibson, she thought she'd ask him to be just a teeny bit more precise about just what he had in mind with the phrase “Bush doctrine.” Through gritted teeth, Gibson unpacked it for her, or the small bits of it he misunderstood. The Bush Doctrine, he lectured,
“as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense; that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?”
In response, Palin said, “Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.”
The truth of it is the Left lassoes only the one element of the Bush doctrine, namely the possibility of resort to preemptive war if necessary, as the entire Bush policy, instead of only one contingent part of it. And because the Left construes pre-emptive American military action--especially if it's done without that coveted “permission slip” that only the U.N. can give--as the moral equivalent of what an unprovoked nuclear first-strike on the USSR would have been at the height of the Cold War.
Never mind that after five years of the Bush doctrine we still have not launched nukes against Iran or North Korea, nor sent divisions into Pakistan. Nor that even the wobbliest obstructionist nations of Western Europe have, as time has passed--even France, even Germany--come over to our side--to Bush's side--in foreign policy matters--rendering to a nullity the endless crying about the loss of American prestige in the world. It doesn't matter, because nothing can lessen the unimaginable horror for the Left that, in their minds, is connoted by the phrase, "the Bush Doctrine." Even if Gibson didn’t intend to use the expression in the worst possible way, the wide-open manner he threw it at Governor Palin was the juiciest possible enticement to the wackiest of his anti-Palin viewers to fill in its meaning with all the sinister content they could manage.
Thus, Governor Palin was challenged to answer out loud and on the record an unspoken set of premises that, variously, would have sounded something like this in the entertainment rooms of America's Democrats:
GIBSON: “Governor Palin, do you agree with the Bush doctrine of arrogant, cowboy diplomacy cum warmongering, by which the USA engages in unilateral invasions at the drop of a hat, intending to impose our imperialistic, oil-stealing, racist policies of torture on nations that never did anything to us, while thumbing our nose at a disapproving international community, for the base purposes of enriching Dick Cheney's friends and other oilmen, destroying America’s reputation in the world, and establishing a Third Reich bent on silencing critics who speak truth to power, and all in exchange for not making us any safer than we were before 9/11?”
PALIN: “Why, yes, Charlie. Yes, I do agree with the Bush doctrine.”
Knowing about the trap, or even just sensing it, enabled Governor Palin to do the right thing by forcing Gibson to clarify exactly what he was after. Sure enough, when he did define what he meant by the Bush doctrine, his bias came right through.
So score one more for Palin. Let them write their silly headlines about how “clueless” she is on foreign policy. We already knew when Palin agreed to a sit-down with the MSM that the morning-after press was going to find fault. The only issue was how bad it would be. What Gibson was going for, and didn’t get, were headlines this morning reading something like this:
Palin Promises Four More Years of Bush’s Shoot-First, Go-It-Alone Strategy.
That didn’t happen. That’s one more for the good guys.
Just so Governor Palin refused to let Charlie Gibson plop his loaded question on her about the “Bush Doctrine” without insisting he be very specific about what he had in mind. Naturally, the media has leapt upon her response (not much else to leap on, I guess), calling it proof that she had no idea what Gibson was talking about—which shows she is such a foreign-policy nincompoop that she must never be allowed within 20 kopecks of a Vladimir Putin. Writes the BBC:
“Governor Palin did seem rather hazy when asked whether she agreed with the Bush doctrine.
‘In what respect?’ she asked, without seeming to know that it was a reference to pre-emptive war.” (“A little of real Palin revealed”).
But that’s the whole point. Who said Gibson’s use of the expression, “the Bush doctrine,” “was a reference to pre-emptive war”? Why not understand it as a reference to other, less loaded aspects of what has been described, with greater or lesser accuracy (usually lesser), as the “Bush doctrine,” aspects such as refusing to “permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons,” or a commitment to supporting “democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world”?
("What about the Bush Doctrine?")
Or how about, as TIME magazine faintly praised it with faint damnation in 2006, by calling it “the foundation for a grand strategy to fight Islamic terrorists and rogue states by spreading democracy around the world and pre-empting gathering threats before they materialize.”
The official White House statement as to the Bush doctrine, in Spring 2002, summarized its goals as follows:
• champion aspirations for human dignity;
• strengthen alliances to defeat global terrorism and work to prevent attacks against us and our friends;
• work with others to defuse regional conflicts;
• prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies, and our friends, with weapons of mass destruction;
• ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade;
• expand the circle of development by opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy;
• develop agendas for cooperative action with other main centers of global power; and
• transform America’s national security institutions to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century.
So then, these are things we don’t want our Vice President to agree with?
But in the mouths of the Left, and the media they control, the expression “Bush doctrine” has been co-opted to contain everything the Left has ever hated about Bush’s approach to international relations. And of course, everything they hate about that is a whole lot. Behold just some of what Mother Jones managed to squeeze into their explanation of the Bush Doctrine:
“The doctrine goes beyond the preemption theme sounded by President Bush in a West Point speech last June. Read beneath its kitchen-sink rhetoric and you see, in black and white, Bush codifying the unilateral treaty-busting moves of his first months in office -- his rejection of the Kyoto climate-change protocol, his cancellation of the ABM accord, his obstruction of the bioweapons treaty, and his flat withdrawal from participation in the International Criminal Court, to name only the most dramatic.” ("America's Age of Empire").
In the words of Salon.com, “the Bush doctrine is a supremely dangerous cocktail, an explosive blend of the arrogance of our uniquely powerful post-Cold War military strength laced with a mind-numbing fear of box-cutter-wielding maniacs”.
Then there’s John Edward’s version of the Bush doctrine. You remember Edwards: he was a VP candidate in 2004, and in the four years since then he still hasn't faced a particle of the Klieg light Sarah Palin's had to face in just the past 2 weeks--and that's in spite of his lying, his adultery, and the way he combs his hair. But back when Edwards was still considered a serious moral entity, (at least by the national press, who don't know any better), he airily dismissed not only the Bush doctrine, but the global terror war that led to so much of it, with this explanation:
“This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do....It's been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true.”
So when Sarah heard the question from Gibson, she thought she'd ask him to be just a teeny bit more precise about just what he had in mind with the phrase “Bush doctrine.” Through gritted teeth, Gibson unpacked it for her, or the small bits of it he misunderstood. The Bush Doctrine, he lectured,
“as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense; that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?”
In response, Palin said, “Charlie, if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.”
The truth of it is the Left lassoes only the one element of the Bush doctrine, namely the possibility of resort to preemptive war if necessary, as the entire Bush policy, instead of only one contingent part of it. And because the Left construes pre-emptive American military action--especially if it's done without that coveted “permission slip” that only the U.N. can give--as the moral equivalent of what an unprovoked nuclear first-strike on the USSR would have been at the height of the Cold War.
Never mind that after five years of the Bush doctrine we still have not launched nukes against Iran or North Korea, nor sent divisions into Pakistan. Nor that even the wobbliest obstructionist nations of Western Europe have, as time has passed--even France, even Germany--come over to our side--to Bush's side--in foreign policy matters--rendering to a nullity the endless crying about the loss of American prestige in the world. It doesn't matter, because nothing can lessen the unimaginable horror for the Left that, in their minds, is connoted by the phrase, "the Bush Doctrine." Even if Gibson didn’t intend to use the expression in the worst possible way, the wide-open manner he threw it at Governor Palin was the juiciest possible enticement to the wackiest of his anti-Palin viewers to fill in its meaning with all the sinister content they could manage.
Thus, Governor Palin was challenged to answer out loud and on the record an unspoken set of premises that, variously, would have sounded something like this in the entertainment rooms of America's Democrats:
GIBSON: “Governor Palin, do you agree with the Bush doctrine of arrogant, cowboy diplomacy cum warmongering, by which the USA engages in unilateral invasions at the drop of a hat, intending to impose our imperialistic, oil-stealing, racist policies of torture on nations that never did anything to us, while thumbing our nose at a disapproving international community, for the base purposes of enriching Dick Cheney's friends and other oilmen, destroying America’s reputation in the world, and establishing a Third Reich bent on silencing critics who speak truth to power, and all in exchange for not making us any safer than we were before 9/11?”
PALIN: “Why, yes, Charlie. Yes, I do agree with the Bush doctrine.”
Knowing about the trap, or even just sensing it, enabled Governor Palin to do the right thing by forcing Gibson to clarify exactly what he was after. Sure enough, when he did define what he meant by the Bush doctrine, his bias came right through.
So score one more for Palin. Let them write their silly headlines about how “clueless” she is on foreign policy. We already knew when Palin agreed to a sit-down with the MSM that the morning-after press was going to find fault. The only issue was how bad it would be. What Gibson was going for, and didn’t get, were headlines this morning reading something like this:
Palin Promises Four More Years of Bush’s Shoot-First, Go-It-Alone Strategy.
That didn’t happen. That’s one more for the good guys.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Sign of Contradiction
And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (Luke 2.34).
In Catholic theological tradition the “sign spoken against” described in Luke in the person of Jesus manifests, in Himself and elsewhere, as a “sign of contradiction,” that is, a Christian sign so powerfully linked with Christ Himself, and the manifest holiness of His life lived it in such stark contradiction to all that we misunderstand as valuable in this world, that the sign draws forth an immediate and ferocious attack on Christ or those united with Him. “From this attack,” explains Catholic teaching, “ensues a double-movement: (2) the downfall of those who reject Christ, and (3) the rise of those who accept him.”
This thought was strongly on my mind when I read this column by Mona Charen on Tuesday: “Is Trig at the Heart of Media's Reaction to Palin?” She manages to capture in only a very few words the essence of this recent story about Governor Palin (and not only Sarah Palin, but others, too, mishandled by the media, and hated irrationally by the Left). This is the story as I've sensed it myself, but haven't been able to express so well.
She writes, in part:
There were basically two things known about Sarah Palin when her name was announced on Aug. 29 and the mediasphere began to shudder and pulsate: She was a recently elected governor and the mother of five children including a handicapped infant. The scorn from the mainstream press and the left-leaning blog world was both intense and instantaneous. Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic immediately began circulating rumors that Trig was not the governor's baby -- that she had engaged in a huge charade to cover up her teen daughter's illegitimate child. The New York Times reported on the front page that Palin had been a member of the Alaska Independence Party. Eleanor Clift of Newsweek described the reaction of most newsrooms to Palin's elevation as "literally laughter." US Weekly rushed out a cover story picturing Palin holding her baby son with the headline "Babies, Lies, & Scandal."
. . . .
The example of people living their principles by embarking on the undeniably difficult path of raising a handicapped child is a hard one to dismiss. In fact, it's hard not to admire. Don't most of us, deep down, really think that the most humane and honorable thing is to treat all life as sacred? Even if you are not religious or have no belief in God -- doesn't it appeal to an enlightened humanism to give support and love to the handicapped? In fact, most pro-choice people probably treat the handicapped with terrific compassion and care. They doubtless support civil rights legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act, additional school spending, and generous Social Security benefits. They'd be the first to hold the door for someone in a wheelchair, and they'd be friendly toward anyone with obvious mental retardation.
But for themselves, they would abort. And there stands Sarah, Trig Palin in her arms, a beautiful ambassador for the path of humility, duty, honor, and grace. It's no wonder she was in their crosshairs from the get go.
#
She's in good company.
In Catholic theological tradition the “sign spoken against” described in Luke in the person of Jesus manifests, in Himself and elsewhere, as a “sign of contradiction,” that is, a Christian sign so powerfully linked with Christ Himself, and the manifest holiness of His life lived it in such stark contradiction to all that we misunderstand as valuable in this world, that the sign draws forth an immediate and ferocious attack on Christ or those united with Him. “From this attack,” explains Catholic teaching, “ensues a double-movement: (2) the downfall of those who reject Christ, and (3) the rise of those who accept him.”
This thought was strongly on my mind when I read this column by Mona Charen on Tuesday: “Is Trig at the Heart of Media's Reaction to Palin?” She manages to capture in only a very few words the essence of this recent story about Governor Palin (and not only Sarah Palin, but others, too, mishandled by the media, and hated irrationally by the Left). This is the story as I've sensed it myself, but haven't been able to express so well.
She writes, in part:
There were basically two things known about Sarah Palin when her name was announced on Aug. 29 and the mediasphere began to shudder and pulsate: She was a recently elected governor and the mother of five children including a handicapped infant. The scorn from the mainstream press and the left-leaning blog world was both intense and instantaneous. Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic immediately began circulating rumors that Trig was not the governor's baby -- that she had engaged in a huge charade to cover up her teen daughter's illegitimate child. The New York Times reported on the front page that Palin had been a member of the Alaska Independence Party. Eleanor Clift of Newsweek described the reaction of most newsrooms to Palin's elevation as "literally laughter." US Weekly rushed out a cover story picturing Palin holding her baby son with the headline "Babies, Lies, & Scandal."
. . . .
The example of people living their principles by embarking on the undeniably difficult path of raising a handicapped child is a hard one to dismiss. In fact, it's hard not to admire. Don't most of us, deep down, really think that the most humane and honorable thing is to treat all life as sacred? Even if you are not religious or have no belief in God -- doesn't it appeal to an enlightened humanism to give support and love to the handicapped? In fact, most pro-choice people probably treat the handicapped with terrific compassion and care. They doubtless support civil rights legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act, additional school spending, and generous Social Security benefits. They'd be the first to hold the door for someone in a wheelchair, and they'd be friendly toward anyone with obvious mental retardation.
But for themselves, they would abort. And there stands Sarah, Trig Palin in her arms, a beautiful ambassador for the path of humility, duty, honor, and grace. It's no wonder she was in their crosshairs from the get go.
#
She's in good company.
'Bearing Witness to Virtue'
This from yesterday's National Review Online:
Bearing Witness to Virtue
Defending the honor of those in uniform.
By David French
Diyala Province, Iraq — Every now and then I get e-mails from friends and family members with subject lines like “Can you believe this?” or “This will make you mad!” Invariably they link to some form of radical rant that either slanders soldiers or so completely departs from the reality I see and experience on the ground in Iraq that I laugh out loud. I typically read and dismiss these messages. In a nation of 300 million, there will always be “those people” — individuals so consumed with ignorance, dominated by hatred, and obsessed with the political cause of the moment that they lose all perspective. But as I prepare to wrap up my deployment and head back home, I’ve changed my mind.
We simply cannot let lies pass unopposed.
Those of us who have been here — who have spent a year (and typically more) of our lives in this place — must speak the truth. Unless we do, yesterday’s slander can become today’s conventional wisdom and tomorrow’s history.
One week ago, I opened one of those e-mails which linked to an insidious article not from some fringe blogger fond of words like “rethuglican” or “Bushitler,” but from a respected member of the mainstream media, a self-described conservative who has occupied space in the most coveted perches of political commentary. Andrew Sullivan, writing from The Atlantic Monthly’s website, compared Russia’s aggression against Georgia with the United States Army in Iraq with the following words:
Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army — because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? (Emphasis added).
I was appalled. As an officer in the 2d Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment (LTC Paul T. Calvert, Commanding) in eastern Diyala Province, I serve in a unit which is at the very tip of the spear in the Diyala Province, arguably now the central front of the war and one of Iraq’s bloodiest provinces. As a judge advocate, one of my core functions is detainee operations. So I know and have lived our “standard operating procedure.”
I first wanted to write to enlighten Mr. Sullivan about the way our soldiers truly behave. I wanted to tell him of the young men who risk death to capture men they could have killed. I wanted to tell him we are so careful with our detainees that the single worst injury ever suffered by any of the hundreds of men our squadron detained even momentarily was a scraped knee. I wanted to describe our procedures for collecting evidence — procedures so demanding that soldiers have braved IED-laden roads to obtain sworn statements from troops in the field so that detainees could be prosecuted according to the rule of law.
But I realized that all of that would be futile. I realized that Sullivan (and others like him) would slander the 99 percent of soldiers who do the right thing by reference to the 1 percent (or less) who commit crimes. And in the minds of many who inhabit Beltway coffeehouses, cubicles in Brussels, and university lecture halls, we could die doing right . . . but they will still define us by those who do wrong.
So if I can’t persuade Andrew Sullivan, perhaps the Iraqis can. After all, they’ve lived with our “standard operating procedure” every day for more than five years. Who knows the Army better than they?
So, Mr. Sullivan, I have a few questions for you: If “the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive” practices are our “standard operating procedure” why do the al-Qaeda terrorists I’ve seen (and I’ve personally been face to face with more than 100) often visibly relax when they enter Coalition custody? Why do they so frequently and readily surrender rather than even try to escape our allegedly vicious detention? Why do they sometimes plead to remain in our facilities? If individuals are arbitrarily “dragged off the streets” for “torture and abuse,” why do civilians, including the smallest children, pour out of their homes to see and greet American soldiers when we walk through their villages? Why do they hide behind their mud and stone walls only when they fear reprisals from our enemies or suspect an imminent firefight? If we are such monsters, why do sheikhs and everyday citizens beg for us to stay with them, rather than living in dusty combat outposts in the heart of their communities?
Perhaps Iraqi citizens would shut their doors in fear if they learned about the army from Mr. Sullivan’s columns rather than from their personal interactions. Perhaps insurgents would fight to the death every time rather than face our “racist, dehumanizing” detention if they attended a panel discussion at your average university. Perhaps children would run screaming in fear if they saw almost any of Hollywood’s recent “important” films about the war. But they don’t see any of that. Instead, they see and experience the U.S. Army as it is, warts and all. And while they chafe at the presence of foreign soldiers (as any proud people would), they are making their choice. For more than five years they have seen the contrast between our soldiers and the terrorists and militias. And unlike Andrew Sullivan, they can tell the difference.
Because nothing less than history is at stake (and so few have seen the truth with their own eyes), it’s time for those of us who’ve been here to set the record straight. We must testify to the brutality of our enemies — just two days ago, al-Qaeda thugs in our area of operations shot a two-month-old infant in the face. More importantly, we must bear witness to the courage and virtue of our brothers- and sisters-in-arms.
Some try to define the 99 percent through the actions of the 1 percent.
We can never let that happen.
— David French is a senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund and a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. He is winding down his first deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Bearing Witness to Virtue
Defending the honor of those in uniform.
By David French
Diyala Province, Iraq — Every now and then I get e-mails from friends and family members with subject lines like “Can you believe this?” or “This will make you mad!” Invariably they link to some form of radical rant that either slanders soldiers or so completely departs from the reality I see and experience on the ground in Iraq that I laugh out loud. I typically read and dismiss these messages. In a nation of 300 million, there will always be “those people” — individuals so consumed with ignorance, dominated by hatred, and obsessed with the political cause of the moment that they lose all perspective. But as I prepare to wrap up my deployment and head back home, I’ve changed my mind.
We simply cannot let lies pass unopposed.
Those of us who have been here — who have spent a year (and typically more) of our lives in this place — must speak the truth. Unless we do, yesterday’s slander can become today’s conventional wisdom and tomorrow’s history.
One week ago, I opened one of those e-mails which linked to an insidious article not from some fringe blogger fond of words like “rethuglican” or “Bushitler,” but from a respected member of the mainstream media, a self-described conservative who has occupied space in the most coveted perches of political commentary. Andrew Sullivan, writing from The Atlantic Monthly’s website, compared Russia’s aggression against Georgia with the United States Army in Iraq with the following words:
Just imagine if the press were to discover a major jail in Gori, occupied by the Russians, where hundreds of Georgians had been dragged in off the streets and tortured and abused? What if we discovered that the orders for this emanated from the Kremlin itself? And what if we had documentary evidence of the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive practices against the vulnerable as the standard operating procedure of the Russian army — because the prisoners were suspected of resisting the occupying power? (Emphasis added).
I was appalled. As an officer in the 2d Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment (LTC Paul T. Calvert, Commanding) in eastern Diyala Province, I serve in a unit which is at the very tip of the spear in the Diyala Province, arguably now the central front of the war and one of Iraq’s bloodiest provinces. As a judge advocate, one of my core functions is detainee operations. So I know and have lived our “standard operating procedure.”
I first wanted to write to enlighten Mr. Sullivan about the way our soldiers truly behave. I wanted to tell him of the young men who risk death to capture men they could have killed. I wanted to tell him we are so careful with our detainees that the single worst injury ever suffered by any of the hundreds of men our squadron detained even momentarily was a scraped knee. I wanted to describe our procedures for collecting evidence — procedures so demanding that soldiers have braved IED-laden roads to obtain sworn statements from troops in the field so that detainees could be prosecuted according to the rule of law.
But I realized that all of that would be futile. I realized that Sullivan (and others like him) would slander the 99 percent of soldiers who do the right thing by reference to the 1 percent (or less) who commit crimes. And in the minds of many who inhabit Beltway coffeehouses, cubicles in Brussels, and university lecture halls, we could die doing right . . . but they will still define us by those who do wrong.
So if I can’t persuade Andrew Sullivan, perhaps the Iraqis can. After all, they’ve lived with our “standard operating procedure” every day for more than five years. Who knows the Army better than they?
So, Mr. Sullivan, I have a few questions for you: If “the ghastliest forms of racist, dehumanizing, abusive” practices are our “standard operating procedure” why do the al-Qaeda terrorists I’ve seen (and I’ve personally been face to face with more than 100) often visibly relax when they enter Coalition custody? Why do they so frequently and readily surrender rather than even try to escape our allegedly vicious detention? Why do they sometimes plead to remain in our facilities? If individuals are arbitrarily “dragged off the streets” for “torture and abuse,” why do civilians, including the smallest children, pour out of their homes to see and greet American soldiers when we walk through their villages? Why do they hide behind their mud and stone walls only when they fear reprisals from our enemies or suspect an imminent firefight? If we are such monsters, why do sheikhs and everyday citizens beg for us to stay with them, rather than living in dusty combat outposts in the heart of their communities?
Perhaps Iraqi citizens would shut their doors in fear if they learned about the army from Mr. Sullivan’s columns rather than from their personal interactions. Perhaps insurgents would fight to the death every time rather than face our “racist, dehumanizing” detention if they attended a panel discussion at your average university. Perhaps children would run screaming in fear if they saw almost any of Hollywood’s recent “important” films about the war. But they don’t see any of that. Instead, they see and experience the U.S. Army as it is, warts and all. And while they chafe at the presence of foreign soldiers (as any proud people would), they are making their choice. For more than five years they have seen the contrast between our soldiers and the terrorists and militias. And unlike Andrew Sullivan, they can tell the difference.
Because nothing less than history is at stake (and so few have seen the truth with their own eyes), it’s time for those of us who’ve been here to set the record straight. We must testify to the brutality of our enemies — just two days ago, al-Qaeda thugs in our area of operations shot a two-month-old infant in the face. More importantly, we must bear witness to the courage and virtue of our brothers- and sisters-in-arms.
Some try to define the 99 percent through the actions of the 1 percent.
We can never let that happen.
— David French is a senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund and a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. He is winding down his first deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Headlines Unclouded by the Facts
Us Weekly ran an incendiary cover about Sarah Palin last week that’s clearly aimed at coloring the thinking of lots of grocery-shoppers glancing at it on their way through the checkout lane. Megyn Kelly of Fox News took the editor to task for the misleading headline, and the sloppy story inside that the editor insisted was a very balanced account of a “big news story.”
In short, she gets it done.
As the interview makes plain, the editor didn't seem too concerned that the "big story" Us Weekly had to rush to get on its cover wasn't about to be slowed getting into print because of worries about, you know, facts.
At Least Pilate Had Executive Experience
The last time Rep. Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, drew our notice, he was betraying a bitter animosity towards Christians in the government, if not Christians sharing the planet with him at all. (“Anti-Religious Bias in the House”). This is all the stranger considering Cohen's apparent newly-discovered admiration for Jesus of Nazareth, and what he inaccurately imagines to be the Lord’s “community-organizing.”
Or maybe Cohen loves the organizing Jesus was doing, he just hates the community He actually organized.
Regardless, Cohen just couldn’t resist repeating the bad quip he lifted from the Internet, the one aimed at Gov. Sarah Palin, that runs, “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus. . . .[but] Pontius Pilate was a governor.” (“Congressman likens Palin to Christ's crucifier”).
Bill Maher, watch out.
But the joke's on Cohen and his co-comedians. It so happens we've stolen an advanced peek at some of tomorrow's Gallup results, and it may interest you to know that, in one poll asking registered voters: "If the election were held today and the only choice is between the historical Pontius Pilate and Barack Obama," results show voters still would prefer Pilate over Obama in a landslide.
Or maybe Cohen loves the organizing Jesus was doing, he just hates the community He actually organized.
Regardless, Cohen just couldn’t resist repeating the bad quip he lifted from the Internet, the one aimed at Gov. Sarah Palin, that runs, “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus. . . .[but] Pontius Pilate was a governor.” (“Congressman likens Palin to Christ's crucifier”).
Bill Maher, watch out.
But the joke's on Cohen and his co-comedians. It so happens we've stolen an advanced peek at some of tomorrow's Gallup results, and it may interest you to know that, in one poll asking registered voters: "If the election were held today and the only choice is between the historical Pontius Pilate and Barack Obama," results show voters still would prefer Pilate over Obama in a landslide.
Obama's Lipstick Stain Might Come Out with 'A Little Bit of Soap'
Shortly after Obama’s lipstick remark blew up in his face, (Obama on Lipstick Fight: ‘Enough Is Enough’), he lost no time in placing responsibility for the flap where it belongs , that is, everywhere but on himself. But he hasn't cast all the blame for it on John McCain. He had plenty left over for his own speechwriters and campaign advisers--the ones who each day are charged with filling up the the empty in his empty suit. One outburst about 24 hours ago was positively lyrical:
(Sung bouncily, to the melody of “Lipstick on Your Collar”)
‘Liptick on a Pig’
By Barack Obama
First you wrote that speech for me, told me it was witty
Last night Dems just ate it up, today we just look shitty
Now they say it’s 'disrespect,' say that I’m the pig
‘Lipstick on a pig!,’ boys? Guys you fouled up big!
[CHORUS]
‘Lipstick on a pig!'s just got those sweeties hoppin’!
‘Lipstick on a pig!’ boys, just makes my polls keep droppin’!
Wish I had a dollar, each flub you make me make
But ‘lipstick on a pig!’ boys, man that took the cake!
Now you tell me shout ‘ENOUGH,’ raise the ‘SWIFTBOAT’ cry!
Say our side’s above all that--you askin' me to lie?!
Why’d we ever pick this fight, with that Alaskan dish?
‘Cuz when they pull that wrapper off, it’s me that smells like fish!
so
[CHORUS]
‘Lipstick on a pig!’ boys, man what were you thinkin’?
‘Lipstick on a pig!’ boys, now it's me who’s stinkin’!
Oughtta charge a dollar, each faux you make me pas
But ‘lipstick on a pig!’ boys, there oughtta be a law!
(With apologies to the late Connie Francis).
(Sung bouncily, to the melody of “Lipstick on Your Collar”)
‘Liptick on a Pig’
By Barack Obama
First you wrote that speech for me, told me it was witty
Last night Dems just ate it up, today we just look shitty
Now they say it’s 'disrespect,' say that I’m the pig
‘Lipstick on a pig!,’ boys? Guys you fouled up big!
[CHORUS]
‘Lipstick on a pig!'s just got those sweeties hoppin’!
‘Lipstick on a pig!’ boys, just makes my polls keep droppin’!
Wish I had a dollar, each flub you make me make
But ‘lipstick on a pig!’ boys, man that took the cake!
Now you tell me shout ‘ENOUGH,’ raise the ‘SWIFTBOAT’ cry!
Say our side’s above all that--you askin' me to lie?!
Why’d we ever pick this fight, with that Alaskan dish?
‘Cuz when they pull that wrapper off, it’s me that smells like fish!
so
[CHORUS]
‘Lipstick on a pig!’ boys, man what were you thinkin’?
‘Lipstick on a pig!’ boys, now it's me who’s stinkin’!
Oughtta charge a dollar, each faux you make me pas
But ‘lipstick on a pig!’ boys, there oughtta be a law!
(With apologies to the late Connie Francis).
Saturday, September 06, 2008
The Wrong War?
This is something I could have said any time, but I think I’ll say it now after being reminded yet again how the Left repeats that we shouldn’t have fought against Saddam, but only against "the guys who hit us on 9/11."
Taken to its most literal extreme, the guys who hit us on 9/11:
1. All died in the crash, except one, who was arrested and is at Gitmo, where the Left today battles for his release. Ergo, there’s nothing more we can do about guys who hit us on 9/11 except remember 9/11 as a “tragedy” and go back to ignoring Islamic fascism. Except, naturally, for the surviving 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani, who should be granted all the due process rights for which our forefathers died, and then released with an apology and US citizenship, and a chair in Middle Eastern Studies at a prestigious American university as reparations for keeping him all this time at Gitmo.
2. 15 of the 19 were Saudis, and none of them Afghanis. The leader, Muhamad Atta, was Egyptian, and the remaining non-Saudis were from UAE and Lebanon. Ergo, we should not have invaded Afghanistan, who, even taking into account their criminal government the Taliban, were not technically “the guys who attacked us on 9/11.” They were only sympathizers, providers of material support, and enablers of terrorists. In other words, they’re no worse than the New York Times, CAIR, or the administrators of Columbia University. Ergo, we should never have attacked Afghanistan. Instead, we should have attacked and deposed the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Lebanon.
Oh, and of Columbia University.
The way I see it, there either were only 20 guys who hit us on 9/11 or, as I sincerely believe is closer to the truth, 20 million guys, or 30 million, or more, scattered across the Islamic world and in the West and praying and plotting daily for a chance to hit us again, and again, and again: Iranians, Afghanis, Saudi, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Americans--with names like Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Baathists, and on and on and on.
The attack on America on 9/11 entitled us to establish the best defensive perimeter we could--a line inside which the enemy could not operate--and outside of which we can monitor and respond to the enemy's moves.
Al Qaeda proved to us that that perimeter did not end at our shores. Nor, even as we have seen in Afghanistan, is it limited to the borders of that country. How big should it be? As big as it needs to be. It certainly encompassed Saddam's Iraq.
This thing is still big folks. George W. Bush saw it was big on the first day, though he faced huge political hurdles that kept him from flinging out America's defensive boundaries as far as we needed them to be. And now after 7 years America is tired and wants to wake up again on 9/10/2001, a dangerous situation threatening to shrink our perimeter even more.
But when our perimeter gets smaller, the enemy's perimeter gets bigger.
I want somebody in charge who understands all this.
Taken to its most literal extreme, the guys who hit us on 9/11:
1. All died in the crash, except one, who was arrested and is at Gitmo, where the Left today battles for his release. Ergo, there’s nothing more we can do about guys who hit us on 9/11 except remember 9/11 as a “tragedy” and go back to ignoring Islamic fascism. Except, naturally, for the surviving 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani, who should be granted all the due process rights for which our forefathers died, and then released with an apology and US citizenship, and a chair in Middle Eastern Studies at a prestigious American university as reparations for keeping him all this time at Gitmo.
2. 15 of the 19 were Saudis, and none of them Afghanis. The leader, Muhamad Atta, was Egyptian, and the remaining non-Saudis were from UAE and Lebanon. Ergo, we should not have invaded Afghanistan, who, even taking into account their criminal government the Taliban, were not technically “the guys who attacked us on 9/11.” They were only sympathizers, providers of material support, and enablers of terrorists. In other words, they’re no worse than the New York Times, CAIR, or the administrators of Columbia University. Ergo, we should never have attacked Afghanistan. Instead, we should have attacked and deposed the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, and Lebanon.
Oh, and of Columbia University.
The way I see it, there either were only 20 guys who hit us on 9/11 or, as I sincerely believe is closer to the truth, 20 million guys, or 30 million, or more, scattered across the Islamic world and in the West and praying and plotting daily for a chance to hit us again, and again, and again: Iranians, Afghanis, Saudi, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Americans--with names like Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Baathists, and on and on and on.
The attack on America on 9/11 entitled us to establish the best defensive perimeter we could--a line inside which the enemy could not operate--and outside of which we can monitor and respond to the enemy's moves.
Al Qaeda proved to us that that perimeter did not end at our shores. Nor, even as we have seen in Afghanistan, is it limited to the borders of that country. How big should it be? As big as it needs to be. It certainly encompassed Saddam's Iraq.
This thing is still big folks. George W. Bush saw it was big on the first day, though he faced huge political hurdles that kept him from flinging out America's defensive boundaries as far as we needed them to be. And now after 7 years America is tired and wants to wake up again on 9/10/2001, a dangerous situation threatening to shrink our perimeter even more.
But when our perimeter gets smaller, the enemy's perimeter gets bigger.
I want somebody in charge who understands all this.
Pop-Pop-BAM!
From National Review Online. Just too funny not to share.
Chicago Way
The familiarity of Obama.
By David Kahane
We’re not afraid of you, John McCain.
Sure, you’re an old, old — did I mention old? — fighter jock who’ll get 99.9 percent of the military’s votes as well as those of every other “patriotic,” “God”-fearing “American.” But so what? Against you we can field an army of community organizers, lawyers, activists, advocates, Code Pink ladies, hippie draft-dodgers, metrosexuals, MoveOn.org’ers, communists, Hollywood stars, NARAL, NAMBLA, the entire population of Seattle, and a platoon of New York Times oped columnists leading most of the rest of the media, all commanded by Der Olbermann. Hail, victory!
Listen, pal o’ mine, I’ve got news for you: This jazz about “fighting” belongs to us. We bought it, we paid for it, and we’ve been fighting for it for 40 years. Not that we mean “fighting” in any sense other than metaphorical, of course. We liberals would never stoop to actual fisticuffs or, the Deity of Your Belief System Here forbid, firearms. Real men really do eat quiche.
But now, Mr. “POW,” you’re in for a real fight. For you, my friend, are up against B. Hussein Jr., the Messiah, the Moshiach, and the Mahdi all rolled into one Manchurian package.
Yes, I’m talking about the great Community Organizer himself, the Lion of the Annenberg Challenge; the invisible editor of The Harvard Law Review; the Illinois state senator whose favorite vote was “present”; the speechifying U.S. senator who started running for the White House almost as soon as he got to Washington; the Land of Lincoln’s very own “Cadillac” Deval Patrick on a grander scale — ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, wearing the red trunks with the hammer and sickle on them: the Punahou Kid!
Let me tell you, this man Barry Soetero, a.k.a. the Talking Parrot, is tough. His fight manager, trainer and dialogue coach is none other than David Axelrod, dubbed “Obama’s Narrator,” by the New York Times. Axelrod is the former journalist and political columnist at the Chicago Tribune who switched sides, working on the late Harold Washington’s campaign for mayor, defending Mayor Richie Daley against ludicrous charges of “corruption,” and forming his own influential political-consulting firm. Working both sides of the street — that’s the Chicago Way!
Yeah, I said the Chicago Way. Just like in that movie, The Untouchables, written by a guy whose name is no longer spoken in polite liberal circles, you know, the one who wrote a few months ago that he was no longer a, quote, brain-dead liberal, unquote. Hey, David Mamet — can you spell “anathema”?
In Chicago, the media/Daley Machine complex has two role models. One is Jake Lingle, a legman for the Tribune who made five bucks a week and yet wore a $150 diamond-studded belt buckle and owned a $25,000 home in Michigan City, Indiana, where he stashed the wife and kids while he resided in splendor in the Stevens Hotel (now the Hilton) on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Jake’s gig for the Trib was “covering” organized crime, which he did until one fine day in 1930 when somebody messed up his perfectly fine straw boater and ruined a good cigar with a .38-caliber bullet in the back of Jake’s head. Seems that Jake was skimming from the Outfit, and had to be taught a lesson.
That lesson was delivered by the other great Chicago role model: Scarface Al Capone, from Brooklyn and Cicero, Ill., who made sure that the politicians stayed bought, that the booze flowed, that “walking around” money got paid, and that his opponents got what was coming to them well before they knew they had it coming.
One of the ways they roll in Chicago, election-wise, is to win by eliminating opponents before the first vote is cast. You know, find some irregularities in their signature drives — sayonara, progressive activist Alice Palmer! — leak some damaging personal information to the Tribune about Bambi’s 2004 Senate Democratic primary foe, Blair Hull — I wonder who did that? — and finally persuade a friendly judge to unseal some oo-la-la divorce records at the behest of… wait for it… the Chicago Tribune (“Ryan File a Bombshell”). Hasta la vista Republican opponent Jack Ryan and say hello to my little friend, Alan Keyes.
Frankly, McCain, we expected the same thing to happen to your token, imported triggerchick in the red-white-and-blue Photoshopped bikini, Sarah Barracuda. You know, the tough broad who looks like a cross between Macushla Maggie Fitzgerald from Million Dollar Baby and Daisy Mae from Dogpatch, Alaska. We figured the rookie would be so rattled by all the hot lead our media buddies threw at her those first few days that she’d forget to bring her moose knife to a gunfight. How were we to know that she was a natural-born killer, and that her first punch would break B.O. Plenty’s glass jaw and sending him rushing into the arms of Bill O’Reilly, where he proclaimed that of course the surge worked, he always said it would work, and furthermore he always said that he always said the surge would work, but that he still thought it was a sucky idea.
Then you delivered another low blow last night when, at the end of your speech you defied that crowd of chanting fascists in St. Paul — those who would deny the plain language of the Constitution’s Article One: A Woman’s Right To Murder Her Unborn Baby for Her Own Personal Convenience Shall Not Be Infringed — and roared through the end of your jingoistic inaugural address. I mean “acceptance speech.” Fight, fight, fight, America, truth, justice, and all that stuff, blah blah blah. You were so impassioned and fired up it was almost like you believed what you were saying.
Still, we had to put some ice on that. The look in Bambi’s eyes today is like Dolph Lundgren’s in Rocky IV, after Sly Stallone first bloodies Ivan Drago, and the noble, indestructible Russian thinks: O my Gaia, I could lose this thing.
Afraid of you? Hah!
But this morning, maybe we are.
— “David Kahane” is named after the patron saint of screenwriters in the movie, The Player, who gets bludgeoned and then drowned in Pasadena by a studio executive played by Tim Robbins. You can teach him the finer points of the Chicago Way at kahanenro@gmail.com. If you have scripts or story ideas, though, please send them to Jake Lingle.
— David Kahane is a nom de cyber for a writer in Hollywood. “David Kahane” is borrowed from a screenwriter character in The Player.
Chicago Way
The familiarity of Obama.
By David Kahane
We’re not afraid of you, John McCain.
Sure, you’re an old, old — did I mention old? — fighter jock who’ll get 99.9 percent of the military’s votes as well as those of every other “patriotic,” “God”-fearing “American.” But so what? Against you we can field an army of community organizers, lawyers, activists, advocates, Code Pink ladies, hippie draft-dodgers, metrosexuals, MoveOn.org’ers, communists, Hollywood stars, NARAL, NAMBLA, the entire population of Seattle, and a platoon of New York Times oped columnists leading most of the rest of the media, all commanded by Der Olbermann. Hail, victory!
Listen, pal o’ mine, I’ve got news for you: This jazz about “fighting” belongs to us. We bought it, we paid for it, and we’ve been fighting for it for 40 years. Not that we mean “fighting” in any sense other than metaphorical, of course. We liberals would never stoop to actual fisticuffs or, the Deity of Your Belief System Here forbid, firearms. Real men really do eat quiche.
But now, Mr. “POW,” you’re in for a real fight. For you, my friend, are up against B. Hussein Jr., the Messiah, the Moshiach, and the Mahdi all rolled into one Manchurian package.
Yes, I’m talking about the great Community Organizer himself, the Lion of the Annenberg Challenge; the invisible editor of The Harvard Law Review; the Illinois state senator whose favorite vote was “present”; the speechifying U.S. senator who started running for the White House almost as soon as he got to Washington; the Land of Lincoln’s very own “Cadillac” Deval Patrick on a grander scale — ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, wearing the red trunks with the hammer and sickle on them: the Punahou Kid!
Let me tell you, this man Barry Soetero, a.k.a. the Talking Parrot, is tough. His fight manager, trainer and dialogue coach is none other than David Axelrod, dubbed “Obama’s Narrator,” by the New York Times. Axelrod is the former journalist and political columnist at the Chicago Tribune who switched sides, working on the late Harold Washington’s campaign for mayor, defending Mayor Richie Daley against ludicrous charges of “corruption,” and forming his own influential political-consulting firm. Working both sides of the street — that’s the Chicago Way!
Yeah, I said the Chicago Way. Just like in that movie, The Untouchables, written by a guy whose name is no longer spoken in polite liberal circles, you know, the one who wrote a few months ago that he was no longer a, quote, brain-dead liberal, unquote. Hey, David Mamet — can you spell “anathema”?
In Chicago, the media/Daley Machine complex has two role models. One is Jake Lingle, a legman for the Tribune who made five bucks a week and yet wore a $150 diamond-studded belt buckle and owned a $25,000 home in Michigan City, Indiana, where he stashed the wife and kids while he resided in splendor in the Stevens Hotel (now the Hilton) on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Jake’s gig for the Trib was “covering” organized crime, which he did until one fine day in 1930 when somebody messed up his perfectly fine straw boater and ruined a good cigar with a .38-caliber bullet in the back of Jake’s head. Seems that Jake was skimming from the Outfit, and had to be taught a lesson.
That lesson was delivered by the other great Chicago role model: Scarface Al Capone, from Brooklyn and Cicero, Ill., who made sure that the politicians stayed bought, that the booze flowed, that “walking around” money got paid, and that his opponents got what was coming to them well before they knew they had it coming.
One of the ways they roll in Chicago, election-wise, is to win by eliminating opponents before the first vote is cast. You know, find some irregularities in their signature drives — sayonara, progressive activist Alice Palmer! — leak some damaging personal information to the Tribune about Bambi’s 2004 Senate Democratic primary foe, Blair Hull — I wonder who did that? — and finally persuade a friendly judge to unseal some oo-la-la divorce records at the behest of… wait for it… the Chicago Tribune (“Ryan File a Bombshell”). Hasta la vista Republican opponent Jack Ryan and say hello to my little friend, Alan Keyes.
Frankly, McCain, we expected the same thing to happen to your token, imported triggerchick in the red-white-and-blue Photoshopped bikini, Sarah Barracuda. You know, the tough broad who looks like a cross between Macushla Maggie Fitzgerald from Million Dollar Baby and Daisy Mae from Dogpatch, Alaska. We figured the rookie would be so rattled by all the hot lead our media buddies threw at her those first few days that she’d forget to bring her moose knife to a gunfight. How were we to know that she was a natural-born killer, and that her first punch would break B.O. Plenty’s glass jaw and sending him rushing into the arms of Bill O’Reilly, where he proclaimed that of course the surge worked, he always said it would work, and furthermore he always said that he always said the surge would work, but that he still thought it was a sucky idea.
Then you delivered another low blow last night when, at the end of your speech you defied that crowd of chanting fascists in St. Paul — those who would deny the plain language of the Constitution’s Article One: A Woman’s Right To Murder Her Unborn Baby for Her Own Personal Convenience Shall Not Be Infringed — and roared through the end of your jingoistic inaugural address. I mean “acceptance speech.” Fight, fight, fight, America, truth, justice, and all that stuff, blah blah blah. You were so impassioned and fired up it was almost like you believed what you were saying.
Still, we had to put some ice on that. The look in Bambi’s eyes today is like Dolph Lundgren’s in Rocky IV, after Sly Stallone first bloodies Ivan Drago, and the noble, indestructible Russian thinks: O my Gaia, I could lose this thing.
Afraid of you? Hah!
But this morning, maybe we are.
— “David Kahane” is named after the patron saint of screenwriters in the movie, The Player, who gets bludgeoned and then drowned in Pasadena by a studio executive played by Tim Robbins. You can teach him the finer points of the Chicago Way at kahanenro@gmail.com. If you have scripts or story ideas, though, please send them to Jake Lingle.
— David Kahane is a nom de cyber for a writer in Hollywood. “David Kahane” is borrowed from a screenwriter character in The Player.
Time's Running Out in Iraq
"What if they gave a war and nobody came?" 1960s Hippie Slogan
"What if we won a war and nobody noticed?" -- Me.
If the Left doesn’t get moving, time’s going to run out in Iraq and there won’t be any war left to stop. ("Anbar’s Turnaround Amazes"), ("Bush to announce next week his decision about future US troops levels in Iraq").
In the unlikely event that Obama gets into office, the international peace mission he’ll send to force an end to "this endless war" will find to their amazement that someone else ended it before they got there—and ended it on better terms, and with no thanks to them.
I know Harry Reid’s completely unimpressed with what is amazing everyone else, saying through his spokesman to the New York Times on Thursday: “the American people are still demanding a new strategy.” ("Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible").
What new strategy is left, Harry? If the American people (that is, Democrats), don't want victory or a long-awaited commencement of troop withdrawals from a greatly-pacified Iraq, do they think we should start the war up again and lose it properly, as you predicted?
Thanks to the watery gruel called “news” most Americans still rely on to get informed, a large portion of us still think the situation in Iraq in September 2008 is identical to the situation in Iraq in December 2006. The actual number of roadside bomb attacks, American combat fatalities, that is, the worst stuff of war, has all been dramatically reduced; but for the vast majority of ill-informed news consumers, it is as bad today as it ever was.
This ignorance of basic events in my countrymen is one of my ultimate peeves. For a nation of folks who can calculate and re-calculate multiple streams of changeable data about weather, sports, cell phone features, and celebrity breakups on a daily--no, make that on an hourly basis--it escapes me why so many are so accepting of stale half-truths about national and world events that have been littering the landscape for years? I’m reminded of an old cartoon I read in the late 1970s, of a man in a doctor’s office reading one of the waiting-room magazines, and remarking acidly to the receptionist: “I see where Lyndon Johnson isn’t running for re-election.”
How can a nation bored with last month’s I-Pod technology cling so dearly to lies they were told by the mainstream media five years ago?
"What if we won a war and nobody noticed?" -- Me.
If the Left doesn’t get moving, time’s going to run out in Iraq and there won’t be any war left to stop. ("Anbar’s Turnaround Amazes"), ("Bush to announce next week his decision about future US troops levels in Iraq").
In the unlikely event that Obama gets into office, the international peace mission he’ll send to force an end to "this endless war" will find to their amazement that someone else ended it before they got there—and ended it on better terms, and with no thanks to them.
I know Harry Reid’s completely unimpressed with what is amazing everyone else, saying through his spokesman to the New York Times on Thursday: “the American people are still demanding a new strategy.” ("Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible").
What new strategy is left, Harry? If the American people (that is, Democrats), don't want victory or a long-awaited commencement of troop withdrawals from a greatly-pacified Iraq, do they think we should start the war up again and lose it properly, as you predicted?
Thanks to the watery gruel called “news” most Americans still rely on to get informed, a large portion of us still think the situation in Iraq in September 2008 is identical to the situation in Iraq in December 2006. The actual number of roadside bomb attacks, American combat fatalities, that is, the worst stuff of war, has all been dramatically reduced; but for the vast majority of ill-informed news consumers, it is as bad today as it ever was.
This ignorance of basic events in my countrymen is one of my ultimate peeves. For a nation of folks who can calculate and re-calculate multiple streams of changeable data about weather, sports, cell phone features, and celebrity breakups on a daily--no, make that on an hourly basis--it escapes me why so many are so accepting of stale half-truths about national and world events that have been littering the landscape for years? I’m reminded of an old cartoon I read in the late 1970s, of a man in a doctor’s office reading one of the waiting-room magazines, and remarking acidly to the receptionist: “I see where Lyndon Johnson isn’t running for re-election.”
How can a nation bored with last month’s I-Pod technology cling so dearly to lies they were told by the mainstream media five years ago?
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