Or should I throttle way back and point out that these people are quite simply dangerously insane?A pickup truck carrying rockets exploded on Friday at a large Hamas rally as the group paraded its weapons through a densely packed refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. At least 15 people were killed and dozens were wounded, Palestinian medical officials said.Hamas shouldered the responsibility by claiming it uses duds for parades and that the Israelis must have fired on them from above to cause the explosion. Israel, which has no problem acknowledging such attacks, denied having had anything to do with the explosion. The homemade Katyushas have a notorious reputation for unreliability and instability, and taking them into a large crowd like the one seen in the AP photograph amounts to criminal stupidity.
The powerful blast sent a plume of white smoke into the sky and unleashed pandemonium in the sprawling Jabaliya refugee camp, a Hamas stronghold just north of Gaza City. Body parts were scattered on the ground as ambulances rushed to the scene, and people in the crowd wailed in grief. The casualties included a number of children.
The blast appeared to be accidental, and the Palestinian Interior Ministry issued a statement that called on Hamas to "shoulder its responsibility" for the explosion.
Senator Schumer, how long have you known Katie Barge?And it keeps going for the new Nixon...
How about Lauren Weiner?
How did you meet Barge? Weiner?
Did you know they had worked for David Brock?
Did you ever discuss them with George Soros?
Who first told you about the theft of Lt. Gov. Steele's personal data?
What did you do?
Did you call FBI Director Mueller?
Do you ever call FBI Director Mueller?
Would FBI Direcor Mueller have taken your call?
Have you spoken with Barge since you learned she was the target of an investigation? Weiner? Not even to say that they'd stay on the payroll? Not even a brief conversation in the hall?
Our policymakers have thus far utterly failed to design anything worthy of the name of an Iran policy, even though it is arguably the single most important challenge we face. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley recently answered a question about Iran policy by saying that we did indeed have a policy, but we hadn’t yet written it down. This is reminiscent of the old riddle of whether a falling tree makes a sound if no one is there to hear it: can there be a policy if nobody can define it?Would that he had a morsel of optimism. RTWT.
Lacking any defined policy, we can only judge the president and his aides by their actions, and there aren’t any, aside from the occasional speech or offhand remark at a press conference. The mullahs see that, and treat it with the contempt it deserves. We are currently indistinguishable from the Europeans, who run whenever the Iranians snarl at them.
This is not a war on terror, it is paralysis at best, and appeasement at worst. The hell of it is that it is costing thousands of lives, and will cost many more until the terror masters are destroyed, or we surrender. Those words were inconceivable for many years, but it is a sign of our present fecklessness that they are now entirely appropriate. We can still lose this war. And we cannot win it so long as we are blinded by our potentially fatal failure of strategic vision: we are in a regional war, but we have limited our actions to a single theater. Our most potent weapons are political and ideological, but our actions have been almost exclusively military.
Our main enemy, the single greatest engine in support of the terror war against us, whether Sunni or Shiite, jihadi, or secular, Arab or British or Italian or Spaniard, is Iran. There is no escape from this fact. The only questions are how long it will take us to face it, how effective we will be when we finally decide to act, and how terrible the price will be for our long delay.
All those refugees were very unpopular in Europe. But intervention would only happen if the U.S. joined in. Most Americans were perplexed. This was a European problem, why couldn't the Europeans take care of it? But the Europeans needed American help to keep the Russians (who wanted to keep Yugoslavia together) in line, and wanted American armed forces to take the lead (because European armies were not really up to the task of doing it themselves.) So American went in, with the understanding they would be there for only one year. American troops are still there. The independent states of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia were established. Then, in 1999, Serbia was chasing a million Albanians out of Kosovo, and Europe wanted to use military force against the Serbs to prevent this atrocity. But only if the Americans took the lead. This time, even the UN would not lend moral support. But the Europeans were insistent (they didn't want hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees descending on them). America went in, with airpower, and, more importantly, enough clout to get the Russians to withdraw their support from the Serbs. The Serbs folded, and Kosovo is also still occupied by American and European troops.My, my, my. Yugoslavia? Clinton? War? No U.N. support? Down the Memory Hole it goes my good fascifists!
But many Europeans see Iraq as different. Foreign troops should be pulled out of Iraq immediately, leaving the Iraqis to fight it out among themselves. There will be no refugee crises. Sunni Arab refugees will flee to Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Kurdish refugees will head for Turkey, Shia Arab refugees will run for Iran. Europeans will avert their eyes and change the subject. If there is interruption to oil shipments from the Gulf, American will be blamed for removing an Iraqi government that knew how to keep order in a troubled part of the world.
Most Europeans looked the other way and changed the subject while the nazis and communists slaughtered tens of millions. So what's a few million more Arabs? It's a European tradition. Old habits are hard to break. Better to tolerate tyrants than to try and change the natural order of things.
The Last Jaw DropperOf course, all this forgetfulness works a lot more smoothly once you have flushed Orwell himself down his own Memory Hole...
"When my grandfather left Europe in 1937, the graffiti on the walls read, 'Jews go to Palestine'. Today the graffiti reads, 'Jews out of Palestine'. How soon Europe forgets."
TONY JONES: Michael, why are they letting you get behind this curtain? Is there a message they are wanting you to get out through Time magazine to the rest of the world?Whoops. D**m that infernal internet anyway. How can one run a decent MSMemory Hole nowadays anyway?
MICHAEL WARE: Clearly, these men, just like the American military I deal with and the public affairs officers who stick to me like glue and only let me see what they want me to see when I'm with them, so it is with the Jihadis. They're showing me what they want me to see, which is, to be truthful, quite a lot, but they know anything I see or hear is public record. It's their responsibility to confine their information.
This is what I do. Yeah, they do want to get a message out.
They're so media savvy. If they weren't before, they've learnt it, they've polished it.
Even a year ago when I was meeting these nationalist guerrillas who then were ill formed, not yet in clear command and control organisations, even then they were saying to me, "This war is not going to be won on the battlefield. We can't hope to defeat the Americans. It's going to be won in the living rooms of Iraq and Middle America, it's going to be won on television."
They were saying, "We can maintain this, we can, we have, we can sustain this longer than your political will will last. Before your people call you home." Again, that's a part of it now, they're saying, "We're here and we're not going away," and they want to say that to the West. They can tell Arabic channels this until the cows come home, but to have it coming through an American iconic publication like Time magazine, people will listen.
And look, the fact is it's true.
Wretchard, the more you study history, the more you wonder how the idea that humans are largely rational beings emerged in the first place.'Tis a fascinating question as the Apocalypse materializes before our very eyes.
Clinton's assertion that there was "no evidence that there were weapons of mass destruction" is a flat-out lie. The Consensus Estimate of the American intelligence agencies has been made public, and we have quoted from it and linked to it on many occasions. America's intelligence agencies said, with a "high degree of confidence," that Saddam possessed both chemical and biological weapons. These were the same intelligence reports that Clinton received as President, so he is well aware of them. His statement was not a mistake, it was a lie.And then there's this little Clinton quote from 03:
"[I]t is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons."RTWT.
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