Today's MSM Pork Slop

"In fact, the word “pork” did not appear even once in his story.

He called it “pet projects.”

That has a much nicer sound, doesn’t it?

It is as if congressmen and senators were adopting animals from the local shelter.

Who could oppose pet projects for schoolchildren? Only those mean Republicans, right?

Milbank is not alone in the media shilling for congressional Democrats."

Hellholes Are Hard To Help

"African leaders often point fingers at the West for "not doing enough." But last week's meeting of the Southern African Development Community shows why sensible wealthy nations are reluctant to give aid.

For at that meeting, some of Africa's so-called leaders disgraced themselves by endorsing the brutal, murderous regime of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe's 27 years of misrule have taken a country that was once prosperous — the breadbasket of Africa, it was called — and turned it into a poverty-stricken hellhole rife with famine, genocide and terror, and lacking rule of law."

Leftist Kurds On The NorKorCom Starvation Monarchy

"Lasswell: In the United States the primary organizer of the anti-war movement is a group called ANSWER – Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.

MJT: They lost all the left values, as well. They support North Korea, for God’s sake.

Mohtadi: How could they support North Korea! It’s not Marxist, it’s a kind of secular religion.

Lasswell: It’s a Starvation Monarchy." [ I highly recommend Totten. Go hit his tip jar. You just won't find this kind of depth or sanity in the MSM. And can I trade our leftists for Kurdish ones? Just a thought... -ed. ]

Thompson On Hirsi

"But her new autobiography, Infidel, is out now and the usual suspects are furious that she would argue for the liberation of Muslim women. Due to serious and credible threats, she is once again surrounded by guards.

There were many Germans and other Europeans who came to America and warned of the Nazi threat in the 1930s, including writers and filmmakers. Can you imagine that any of them would have ever needed bodyguards?

Hirsi Ali does — right here in America. Yet too many people still don’t understand what our country is up against. They might if they read her book." [ I have to admit that Thompson has been using his guest host gig for Paul Harvey well. Well enough to remind me of Reagan's communication skills even... -ed. ]

VDH: The End Of Mellifluence

"There are reasons along more existential lines for why Iran acts so boldly. After the end of the Cold War, most Western nations — i.e., Europe and Canada — cut their military forces to such an extent that they were essentially disarmed. The new faith was that, after a horrific twentieth century, Europeans and the West in general had finally evolved beyond the need for war.

With the demise of fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism, and in the new luxury of peace, the West found itself a collective desire to save money that could be better spent on entitlements, to create some distance from the United States, and to enhance international talking clubs in which mellifluent Europeans might outpoint less sophisticated others. And so three post-Cold War myths arose justify these.

First, that the past carnage had been due to misunderstanding rather than the failure of military preparedness to deter evil.

Second, that the foundations of the new house of European straw would be “soft” power. Economic leverage and political hectoring would deter mixed-up or misunderstood nations or groups from using violence. Multilateral institutions — the World Court or the United Nations — might soon make aircraft carriers and tanks superfluous.

All this was predicated on dealing with logical nations — not those countries so wretched as to have nothing left to lose, or so spiteful as to be willing to lose much in order to hurt others a little, or so crazy as to welcome the “end of days.” This has proved an unwarranted assumption. And with the Middle East flush with petrodollars, non-European militaries have bought better and more plentiful weaponry than that which is possessed by the very Western nations that invented and produced those weapons.

Third, that in the 21st century there would be no serious enemies on the world stage. Any violence that would break out would probably be due instead to either American or Israeli imperial, preemptive aggression — and both nations could be ostracized or humiliated by European shunning and moral censure. The more Europeans could appear to the world as demonizing, even restraining, Washington and Tel Aviv, the more credibility abroad would accrue to their notion of multilateral diplomacy.

But even the European Union could not quite change human nature, and thus could not outlaw the entirely human business of war. There were older laws at play — laws so much more deeply rooted than the latest generation’s faddish notions of conflict resolution. Like Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance, which would work only against the liberal British, and never against a Hitler or a Stalin, so too the Europeans’ moral posturing seemed to affect only the Americans, who singularly valued the respect of such civilized moralists."

Welcome To The Fountain Of "Youths"

"Signs that the times are changing —24 hours after the punk jihad riots, the media delivered a profile of the “kid” whose arrest sparked 8 hours of mayhem in the bowels of the Gare du Nord.

The “kid” is one Angelo H. He is, it turns out, 32 years old, an illegal Congolese immigrant, and subject to a deportation order 1993.

The “kid” has been in trouble since he came to France at the age of ten—twenty-two registered condemnations for violent incidents and many that went unreported.

The cops initially went to arrest a little cheater and found they had bagged a hardened criminal. Instead of paying for a ticket like millions of law-abiding passengers Angelo H. jumped the turnstile and was, exceptionally, arrested. In a matter of seconds he had head-butted—or slapped—one of the RATP agents. When the agents wrestled him to the ground, Angelo screamed bloody murder, a small crowd gathered in protest against the agents’ brutality. And the call to battle rang out.

Almost instantly Angelo became a thirteen year-old boy whose arms were fractured by the cruel agents (shades of Mohamed al Dura). Then a pregnant woman was added to the list of victims of police brutality. All that was missing was “the infidels set fire to the mosque.”

Police reinforcements arrived, tried in vain to calm the situation, resorted to the use of tear gas. The crowd swelled to an estimated three to four hundred, battled the police until 1:30 AM (the incident began at 4:30 PM) when calm was restored.

For how long? Anyone who has visited Paris and hurried down the endless corridors of, for example, Châtelet metro & RER station & banlieu hangout, can imagine future battles in this ongoing punk jihad. The clash of civilizations that Europe does not want to recognize is rolling into Paris on the metro rails.

Against the Giuliani principle, represented in a mild French version by Nicolas Sarkozy, stands the jihad-intifada strategy: I disrespect your laws, defy your authority, attack you frontally and if you dare lift a hand against me I scream “victim” and call in my troops."

The Polite Hitch

"At present, it seems that some Democrats are interpreting public disillusionment with Iraq as a mandate for isolationism and for treating a country that occupies a keystone position between Iran and Saudi Arabia as if it were negligible or irritating or an obstacle to plans for universal health care or the arrest of global warming. That this is a huge historical mistake is the least offensive way of putting it."

Offside Farcical Worms

"The flagrant and outrageous Iranian seizure of 15 Royal Navy personnel on patrol in the Shat al-Arab, well outside Iranian waters (we needn’t waste time discussing absurd Iranian claims) is not necessarily connected with anything. The Iranians often pull stunts like that, without fully thinking through their purposes. Rather it should be taken as the latest indication of how unpredictable they are. This is, after all, a country whose president utters public fantasies about nuclear war, in the context of Shia Islamic apocalyptic hallucinations.

But even in this comparatively small matter, in which the Iranians have behaved, yet again, in defiance of all norms of international conduct, just what do the British propose to do about it? Prime Minister Blair said yesterday that efforts to obtain the sailors’ release will enter a “different phase” if diplomatic negotiations fail. In other words, the British will start yelling louder.

What else is possible? It may make no sense for any politician in the West to sink himself, doing what really needs to be done now, to prevent Armageddon farther down the road. It may make more sense to let the catastrophe happen. Whenupon, pretty much everyone will be onside for doing something fairly definitive about Iran." [ Unfortunately, I'm beginning to believe that everyone won't be "onside" when this happens (notice the missing "if"). How I wish I could be more optimistic. We have come to believe that we're history buffs if we can remember the last five minutes and have forgotten that even in WWII there were only 9 Allies. We now ignorantly refer to it as the grand coalition rather than the close run thing it was. The second time a farce and all that... -ed. ]

Something Useful

"My equally ex-RN wife's remark upon seeing Turney on TV wearing a headscarf was "I would have thanked them for giving me something I could use to strangle one of the guards with when I eventually make my escape, but if they want me to wear it, well I would have told them exactly where they can..."

My good wife is a forthright person and decorum prevents me from finishing her remarks."

And Again: Here We Are

"What is the most serious threat facing our civilisation?

Loss of classical liberal values in those western societies that embraced them.

England was the first modern state, the first superpower, the first nation to deal with moral issues around the world, and the first nation to install the benefits of what we might now loosely term a liberal society. I mean that in the 19th century sense of liberalism. That notion of liberalism was also present in America, but made it to the Continent only in a pale and limited form. It is a wonderful social conception that must be vigilantly guarded. It is not shared by other nations in the world. Nor is it shared by many citizens in English-speaking countries. Peculiarly, many of our most educated citizens are least sympathetic to classical liberal ideals. Indeed the term 'liberalism' in the modern day has come to imply a constellation of attitudes that John Stuart Mill would not recognize as liberal at all. Nor would, say, John F. Kennedy recognize them as liberal. Kennedy's conception of liberalism was simultaneously more tolerant and more tough-minded: tolerant about varieties of behavior within the society, and tough-minded toward threats to a tolerant society from without.

That's all gone, now. Today there is far too much sensitivity within societies, and too little hard-nosed recognition of threats from without. We are inclined to be intolerant of speech by our friends and neighbors, and tolerant of beheadings, rape, and homophobia in distant lands.

This makes no sense. But here we are."

Michael Thanks You Very Much

"What is wrong with us that we ignore this human misery and focus on events a hundred years from now? What must we do to awaken our phenomenally rich, spoiled and self-centered society to the issues of the wider world? The global crisis is not 100 years from now—it is right now. We should be addressing it. But we are not. Instead, we cling to the reactionary and anti-human doctrines of outdated environmentalism and turn our backs to the cries of the dying and the starving and the diseased of our shared world.

And if we are going to remain too self-involved to care about the third world, can we at least care about our own? We live in a country where 40% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Where schoolchildren pass through metal detectors on the way to class. Where one child in four says they have seen a murdered person. Where millions of our fellow citizens have no health care, no decent education, no prospects for the future. If we really have trillions of dollars to spend, let us spend it on our fellow human beings. And let us spend it now. And not on our impossible fantasies of what may happen one hundred years from now.

Thank you very much."

The New Tribal Lands

"The flight routes from Pakistan to the United Kingdom are now the most important ideological conduit for radical Islam. The London bombers last summer were British subjects of Pakistani origin. Last week, two more were arrested in connection with the Tube bombings at Manchester Airport as they prepared to board a plane to Karachi.

Meanwhile, flying back from Karachi and Islamabad to Heathrow and Manchester are cousins, lots and lots of them. In his detailed study of the Mirpur district in Pakistan, Roger Ballard estimates that at least half and maybe up to two-thirds of those living in Britain of Mirpuri descent marry first cousins. This is a critical tool of reverse-assimilation: instead of being diluted over the generations, tribal identity is reinforced; in effect, Pakistani tribal lands are now being established in parts of northern England.

It is often forgotten that the Dark Ages were also the heyday of multiculturalism. Each valley held its petty lord and it was possible for places separated only by a few miles to speak totally different languages. But it can't happen again, can it?"

Gutter Priorities ...

... truly makes we want to you know what. As Golda Meir said, "We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us." (HT LGF)

And When Did They Stop Being Corrupt Exactly?

"This is genuine news. Political corruption on a scale as big as Duke Cunningham, and the mainstream press is worried about 8 US attorneys losing their jobs in a completely legal hard-ball political axing-session.

The Culture of Corruption has 'returned' - bigger and better than ever before!" [ Why the quotes on 'returned'? My judgment would be that it can't 'return' if it never went away! A friend of mine proposes the solution to all of this. He suggests that however long you serve in Congress, you automatically have to go serve an equal amount of time in jail when you're done. While it sounds good, if we did this then what you think is gerrymandering now to keep seats safe would be looked back upon nostalgically as child's play... -ed. ]

A New Form Of Evil

"As a young man, in 1974, I was riding on a bus traveling from Beirut to Damascus. The man I sat next to was an English-speaking Iraqi whom I asked at one point in our conversation, "Can you describe your nation in a sentence?" "No problem," he immediately answered. "We Iraqis are the most barbaric people in the world."

I obviously never forgot that man's words, and therefore anticipated great cruelties in Iraq. But neither I nor anyone who predicted a civil war had so much as a premonition of this unprecedented mass murder of the men, women and children among one's own people as a military tactic to defeat an external enemy.

It is, therefore, unfair to blame the Bush administration for not anticipating such a determined "insurgency." Without the mass murder of fellow Iraqis, there would hardly be any "insurgency." The combination of suicide terrorists and a theology of death has created an unprecedented form of "resistance" to an occupier: "We will murder as many men, women and children as we can until you leave." Nor is this a matter of Sunnis murdering Shiites and vice versa: college students, women shopping at a Baghdad market and hospital workers all belong to both groups. Truck bombs cannot distinguish among tribes or religious affiliations.

If America had to fight an insurgency directed solely against us and coalition forces -- even including suicide bombers -- we would surely have succeeded. No one, right, left or center, could imagine a group of people so evil, so devoid of the most elementary and universal concepts of morality, that they would target their own people, especially the most vulnerable, for murder.

That is why we have not yet prevailed in Iraq. Even without all the mistakes made by the Bush administration -- and what political or military leadership has not made many errors in prosecuting a war? -- it could not have foreseen this new form of evil we are witnessing in Iraq.

That is why we have not won.

There are respectable arguments to be made against America's initially going into Iraq. But intellectually honest opponents of the war have to acknowledge that no one could anticipate an "insurgency" that included people leaving children in a car and then blowing them up." [ Please note that none of this would have slowed the (real) Nazis one whit. They simply would have pitched in and helped slaughter the same civilians with gas chambers just like they did in WWII. Which leads me to the key weakness in Prager's thesis: The Nazis did in fact slaughter their own civilians -- it's just that this was not a tactic to repel the Allies! As the wise old Indian teacher said, if Ghandi had been protesting against the Nazis instead of the British he would have quickly been made into a lampshade (or something close enough to it). The Islamists are doing this in equal parts to repel and trick us -- my apologies to all you BDS sufferers out there but neither I nor my second cousin in the 82nd Airborne (or my uncle in the 82nd Airborne in WWII) are most assuredly not Nazis -- as well as intimidate Iraqis into complicity. They have redefined the dictionary entry for "ruthless men". And will do so again as WMD technology continues to filter into their hands... -ed. ]

QOTD: ""Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." -- Milton Friedman"

Evan Sayet: Below Above The Fold

Pajamas has Evan Sayet below the fold. That isn't the right place for him at all. He's an extremely good communicator and razor sharp...

Go Read Walid. Now.

"The capture of British Navy servicemen by Iranian forces is not simply an incident over sea sovereignty in the Persian Gulf. It is a calculated move on behalf of Teheran's Jihadi chess players to provoke a "projected" counter move by London and its American allies. It is all happening in a regional context, carefully engineered by the Mullahs strategic planners. Here is how:

The Iranian regime's master plan is to wait out the remainder of Tony Blair's mandate (few more months) and the remaining "real time" of President Bush (till about the end of 2007). For the thinking process in Tehran, based on their Western consultants, believe that Washington and London have reached the end of the rope and will only have till 2008 to do something major to destabilize Ahmedinijad regime. As explained by a notorious propagandist on al Jazeera today the move is precisely to respond to the Anglo-American attempt to "stir trouble" inside Iran. Anis Naccash, a Lebanese intellectual supporter of the Ayatollahs regime, appearing from Tehran few hours ago on the Qatari-based satellite and "explained" that the "US and the UK must understand that Iran is as much at war with these two powers in as much as they support the rise of movements and security instability inside Iran." He added that Khamenei is clear on the regime's decision to strike: "we will be at war with you on all levels: secret, diplomatic, military and other." Pro-Iranian propagandists in the region, via media and online rushed to warn that this movement is part of Iran's counter-strike against any attempt to destabilize the regime. Two major tracks emerge from these statements, the Iranian military maneuvers and the capture of British Navy personnel."

Just Another Day In Egypt

"The real reason is simple: Where does the government, the corrupt ministers, the ruthless SS officers and their soldiers come from? Aren't they egyptians? Don't they come from egyptian families and households? Aren't they born and raised here like the rest of us? Well, what does that exactly say about us? Whether we like it or not, the government is a reflection of the people. So if the government is ruthless, corrupt and dictatorial, what does that say about the people? What does it say about the parents of the police officers that order their soldiers to beat up and sexually assault women? What does it say about the families of those corrupt government officials who sign away our future and that of our children for a bunch of dirty money? What does it say about a nation that produces such a government, and accepts it, even as it plunders the country and enslaves its people?

Maybe the government is right: Maybe we don't deserve Democracy. Maybe we don't deserve our rights. Maybe we deserve everything that happens to us. We, as people, seem to lack the sense of self-respect and dignity that makes the human being demand his/her right, so how do we expect the government to respect us or give us those rights? We clearly don't deserve them. We clearly deserve to have our rights stolen, our friends imprisoned, and our women assaulted. Cause, otherwise, how would you explain how accepting we are of those things?

Maybe we don't deserve any better.

For the first time ever, I will go to sleep feeling utter hatred and disdain for my countrymen, while my heart weeps silently for my country!

I hope that none of you, ever, gets to experience that feeling!"

Goracle's Majesty

Power Line has one that's just too good...

In Which Glue Melts To Glass?

"See also this Roggio article on the larger situation in Pakistan, which is rapidly coming unglued; even guys like Carl Levin are beginning to sound the alarm.

There are significant implications here for NATO's Afghan operation, and indeed for the future course of the global war. Musharraf's phony accord has handed Osama and his Taliban allies a base comparable to pre-2001 Afghanistan. One they've been busy consolidiating; there are reports that America has no human intelligence left in those sanctuaries. Sanctuaries protected by the nuclear weapons Pakistan was unwisely allowed to obtain - and with the potential for future access to those weapons as al Qaeda and the Taliban further consolidate their strength within Pakistan."