The Clinton Fraud This Time

clipped from opinionjournal.com Sen. Hillary Clinton was asked during a debate this week if she supported New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. At first she seemed to endorse the idea, then claimed, "I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to do it." The next day she took a firmer stand (sort of) by offering general support for Gov. Spitzer's approach, but adding that she hadn't studied his specific plan. She should, and so should the rest of us. It stops just short of being an engraved invitation for people to commit voter fraud.

Catch And Release -- The Universal Solution?

clipped from pajamasmedia.com in the DHS/FBI memo, intelligence analysts provided airport screeners with a summation of “Potential Indicators of Shoe Tampering” (in case the following wasn’t obvious) to help them know what to be on the lookout for: • Shoes with thick soles that could be hollowed out to allow the insertion of explosives. • Wires or other unusual protrusions from shoes. • Shoes that appear to have been dismantled and reassembled. • Individuals walking in an unusual manner. So the real question is, what happens to a person caught wearing this kind of modified shoe? In the recent European bus luggage scenario, the would-be shoe bomber wasn’t onboard. But the little known fact remains that suspicious persons wearing suspicious shoes are caught in U.S. airports more often that you think. But what’s disheartening — and worthy of an argument not with an airport screener but a policy maker or your Congressperson — is that in these cases, federal officials play catch and release.

Fortuyn -- Norway's Turn

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com Bruce Bawer has an interesting article at PJ Media on Norway’s Very Own Ayaan Hirsi Ali. As Europe’s Islamization proceeds apace, the gap widens between ordinary folks’ growing recognition of the outrages that are going on all around them and the movers and shakers’ cynical insistence on pretending that everything’s just hunky-dory. Case in point: the responses to Covered. Uncovered., a new book on hijab. Its author, Hege Storhaug of Norway’s Human Rights Service, is this country’s answer to Ayaan Hirsi Ali – a gutsy advocate of freedom who doesn’t mince words about the illiberal conditions (especially for women and girls) in Europe’s Muslim communities. In short, Fortuyn was demonized as a threat to the very liberty he was fighting to preserve. Among those who heard that this fascist must be stopped was a man named Volkert van der Graaf. Volkert van der Graaf, of course, was the man who murdered Pin Fortuyn.

RTWT.

BTW, I'm strongly with Charles on his opposition to right-wing fascists. Note his note:

Note: Pim Fortuyn may have been labeled a “racist” by the usual suspects for his opposition to the invasion of radical Islam, but he was also strongly opposed to the Belgian Vlaams Belang party; he called them a “fascist” group.

By the way, if Fortuyn was a racist fascist, he was a gay one as I recall. And so would be Bruce Bawer. In a sane world, that would be enough to make the self-righteous left pause to think...

Thompson Firing With Grotius

clipped from volokh.com It's been a long time since a major presidential candidate quoted Grotius, and my view is the more Grotius in America's public debates, the better. I hope Pufendorf starts to get some attention too. It's rather telling that the UN's American defenders fail to directly address an indisputable fact: U.N. Human Rights Council's subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has endorsed a report denying the existence of a human right of self-defense, and the subcommission, pursuant to the report, has declared that all national governments are required by international human rights law to implement various gun control provisions--provisions which, by the UN's standards, make even the gun control laws of New York City and Washington, DC, into violations of international law because they are insufficiently stringent. (See page 14 of the draft BYU article.)

Cool.

The Silenced Return

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com Saad al-Azawi, his wife and four children are among them. They fled to Syria six months ago, leaving behind what had become one of the capital's more dangerous districts—west Baghdad's largely Sunni Khadra region. The family had been living inside a vicious and bloody turf battle between al-Qaida in Iraq and Mahdi Army militiamen. But Azawi said things began changing, becoming more peaceful, in August when radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mahdi Army fighters to stand down nationwide. About the same time, the Khadra neighborhood Awakening Council rose up against brutal al-Qaida control—the imposition of its austere interpretation of Islam, along with the murder and torture of those who would not comply. We've heard plenty about the displacement of Iraqis on account of the sectarian violence. Will we hear from the national media about the meaning of their return?

Pretty Much All You Need To Know...

clipped from instapundit.com GOOD POINT ON THE MURTHA SCANDALS: "Just imagine for a moment if this had been Newt Gingrich." Think we would have heard more?

Join The Sarkozy Revolution!

clipped from www.americanthinker.com When I saw this video, I stood up in awe and ran downstairs to tell my husband the news:  "France is back!" French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, may have just inadvertently fired another "shot heard around the world," declaring a male revolution against the feminization of politics and media the world over.  Long live Sarkozy! Still, from where I'm sitting, the best thing France has ever done here personally just might be the single act of manly gumption their President performed in that now-famous 60 Minutes interview.  By politely, but firmly, refusing to lower his important Office to the level of backyard-fence gossip, he may have single-handedly signaled the end of catty instincts given free reign by media elites who can't even recognize self-restrained, gentlemanly civility when it smacks them in the face.

About time...

The Smug And The Trite

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com The most common failure of imagination, in the politics of this world -- so common that it is not even restricted to people of the liberal political persuasion -- is the failure to grasp that things could always be worse. This cuts both ways on questions of war and peace. I am in favour of war when the reasonably foreseeable consequences of not fighting are even worse than those of the preferred mode of doing so. “No more war” is a prescription for tyranny and genocide: always has been and always will be. On the other hand, I am in favour of not intervening, when the consequences of wading in would be overall worse. That was my argument against bombing our way to Belgrade, even though I agreed the Serbs were behaving monstrously. Likewise it is my argument against, say, bombing our way into Darfur -- attractive as that proposition might seem, It must also be appreciated that all such decisions are messy, and necessarily messy, and horrible, and cannot be reduced to smug, trite slogans.

The Desire To Walk

clipped from www.theaugeanstables.com In a famous remark that explained much about the failure of the revolutions of 1848, the Italian observer Massimo d’Azeglio used the metaphor of the stallion of liberty: The gift of liberty is like a horse, handsome, strong, and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the desire to walk.

What Comes Around...

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com That was the verdict of Michael Yon on Hugh Hewitt's radio show tonight. He was talking about the linked post: “Al Qaeda in Iraq is defeated,” according to Sheik Omar Jabouri, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party and a member of the widespread and influential Jabouri Tribe. Speaking through an interpreter at a 31 October meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters in downtown Baghdad, Sheik Omar said that al Qaeda had been “defeated mentally, and therefore is defeated physically,” referring to how clear it has become that the terrorist group’s tactics have backfired. Operatives who could once disappear back into the crowd after committing an increasingly atrocious attack no longer find safe haven among the Iraqis who live in the southern part of Baghdad. They are being hunted down and killed. Or, if they are lucky, captured by Americans. Yon described the progress he is currently seeing in Iraq as "unbelievable." Let's hope it continues.

More Inconvenient Truths

clipped from www.classicalvalues.com In a great Newsbusters piece, Matthew Sheffield reports something you will definitely not see in your local newspaper. A United Nations scientist has refused the Nobel prize that he (as part of the IPCC) is supposed to share with Al Gore, and for the most damning possible reason. The scientist (IPCC member John R. Christy) claims that the prize was based on a misunderstanding of science: Has the global warming alarmism movement hit its apex? Maybe so. In recent weeks, we've seen a resurgence of hard scientists who have come out strongly against the warm-mongers, the latest of which is Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change member John R. Christy who in an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal tells the world that not only does he not believe no one's proven humans cause global warming, he's refusing his "share" of the Nobel Peace Prize that he was awarded because it was based on a misunderstanding of science.

Dummy Dhimmi Watch

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com While Saudi sheikhs teach young people about the etiquette of wife-beating, Tony Blair’s wife is telling Britain that the Koran does not allow wife-beating.

Welcome To "Peace"

clipped from littlegreenfootballs.com A University of Oregon “peace group” called the Pacifica Forum is planning to remember the Nazi atrocity of Kristallnacht this year with two days of speeches and conferences led by a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier. Yes, really.

Washington Or New York City?

clipped from www.dailymail.com How many people have died at the hands of the American peace movement? Let's see, 2 million in the killing fields of Cambodia . . . So in 1981, Israel took out Hussein's nuke program and the world was better for it. On Sept. 6, 2007, Israeli jets took out what some believe was a developing nuclear facility in Syria. People dance around whether or not it was a building connected to a nuclear program, but I trust Israeli intelligence more than, say, the New York Times. My only question was whether the Syrian facility was connected to Iran's nuclear program. The enemy is a small band of dead-enders who knew enough about structural engineering to bring down a couple of tall buildings. There is no telling what they would do if they got their hands on nuclear weaponry. Strike that. There is. The question is -- Washington or New York City?

Don't Forget The Driver's Licenses

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com From the NYTimes top story for tomorrow morning: Senator Barack Obama said he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran if elected president and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek “regime change” if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues. But let's cut to the chase:  Would he offer them driver's licenses?

Why Didn't I Think Of That?

clipped from www.scrappleface.com (2007-11-01) — As Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton continues to work round the clock with advisers to determine exactly how she feels about granting automobile driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, the Senator today announced she may support New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer’s new proposal to allow undocumented workers to receive airline transport pilot certification from the FAA, allowing them to fly commercial jets.

No More Problems

clipped from pajamasmedia.com 6. We need to speak with Persia. If they want nukes and their neighbors want nukes, who are we to say it’s a bad idea? Appoint Sen. Larry Craig our Ambassador. Let Larry and Mahmoud discuss how the international community can liquidate the state of Israel. No Israel, no more problems. Not only the region and the world, but our university campuses will return to their pre-Israelite calm. The world will shine all the brighter when it’s unburdened by American arrogance and banality. Let’s return to our roots. Good ole’ American isolationism. America, first, now and forever. Return our fleets in the Pacific and Persian Gulf to our shores. Get our troops out of Korea, Germany, the Emirates, wherever. There’s plenty to do here at home. Leave nation building to the Europeans who worked wonders and did their thing in the 20th century. To paraphrase the immortal words of one of my fellow artists, we can hold hands, open a Coke and say, “They like us, they really like us.”

The Depths Of Incompetence

clipped from www.americanthinker.com On Tuesday, the United Nations, with at least tacit U.S. approval, elected the former terrorist state, Libya, to serve a two-year term on the U.N. Security Council. The prospect that Moammar Gaddafi, once the target of U.S. and U.N. sanctions, would participate in the U.N. Security Council decision-making process is part of the charade that relations between Libya and the U.S. are, in the words of Libyan diplomat Giadalla Ettalhi, "back to normal." In truth, the acceptance of oil-rich Libya on the international body charged with maintaining worldwide peace and security, reveals how the need for oil can cleanse even the most heinous of atrocities committed by terrorist states and nullify the suffering of its victims. the so-called "Security" Council has been an inept body of the United Nations for decades. The recent election of Libya can only thrust the Council further into the depths of incompetence, rendering worthless any of the commitments set forth in its charter.

Yiddish

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com John Edwards led the critique of Ms. Hillary on her support of the Senate's Iran resolution. According to Edwwards, the resolution read like it was "written literally in the language of the neo-cons." Support for the resolution was misguided because "we need to stand up to this president. We need to make it absolutely clear that we will not let Bush, Cheney and this administration invade Iran." Ms. Hillary responded that she supported legislation to restrain the Bush administration. Her vote only reflected support for diplomacy. The best line of the night came offstage over at NRO's Corner. In response to Edwards's gibe about the language of the neo-cons, Kathryn Jean Lopez asks: "Would that be Yiddish?"

Why Yes. How Do You Think They Got That Way?

clipped from www.michaeltotten.com doug: You realize that these drugs are used to combat Biologic and Chemical attack, right? Yes, I do. But the author implies that the jihadis are using "adrenaline" to improve their combat performance. In reality, injecting--or taking pills of, I suppose--adrenaline would have the opposite effect. Maybe the insurgents are taking painkiller/speed cocktails, but if so it's an idiotic thing to do. They'll move slower, talk a lot faster, not be able to sleep and become increasingly paranoid and delusional. Great idea.

What Do I Have To Fear From You?

clipped from www.michaeltotten.com The only reason that they lasted for the centuries that they did... was because they were competent at terrorizing their enemies into passive fear, rather than active confrontation. One anecdotal story stated that representatives from a few western governments went to the group to pursue a sort of truce. Sabbah (or one of the people that ran the gang after Hassan's death) met the representatives on the roof of Castle Alamut. He listened politely and then called two of his men, told them to jump from the roof (which they did... and died). He then turned to the westerners and said "What do I have to fear from you?" This bit of history (or historical bullshit as the case may be) is exactly why I supported our invasion of Afghanistan. It's also why I think we'd be better off continuing what we started, rather than getting sidetracked (but that's blood and water under the bridge at this point).

Allah's Dudes

clipped from www.michaeltotten.com I look over at [Staff Sergeant Colin] Fitts, and I know what he's thinking. If this is true, these guys are going to be hard to kill. In Muqdadiyah, my squad watched a drug-crazed Mahdi militiaman charge Cory Brown's Bradley. The gunner blasted him with coax machine-gun fire, shredding his legs. He tumbled off the Bradley and flopped face up onto the street. As we approached him, he started to laugh. The laughter grew into a hysteria-tinged cackle, then ended with a bone-chilling keen. That froze us cold. Watching us with wild eyes, he then pulled a bottle of pills out of a blood-soaked pocket and drained its contents into his mouth. Then he went for something under his jacket. Thinking he was about to detonate a bomb vest, three of us opened fire and riddled him with bullets. We shot and shot until he finally stopped moving. We later discovered the Mahdi militia had gained access to American epinephrine A dude with that in his system is almost superhuman.

Spain Neutralizes Wiretaps...

clipped from www.captainsquartersblog.com That works out to 76 days per victim, a detestable result. Even more detestable, Osman walks away from any responsibility for the Madrid attack. Apparently the Spanish court didn't take Osman's own word for his leadership in attacking Spanish civilians with bombs on 11-M. The lack of a conviction in this case will certainly do nothing to deter future attacks in Spain, especially for those who style themselves as terrorist leaders. Even wiretaps won't bother such people in the future, since the courts don't put any stock into the taped conversations captured by intel and law-enforcement agents. Once again, this shows the limitations in treating acts of war as common criminal acts. Civil court systems do not have the capacity to deal with foreign groups that conduct acts of sabotage and terror, because they were not designed for those purposes. Nations build military forces to handle such acts. Spain has forgotten this, as has most of Europe. Perhaps Osman's acquittal will remind them.

... on their way back to Andalusia...

Now You Don't...

clipped from www.dailymail.co.uk New technology that can make tanks invisible has been unveiled by the Ministry of Defence. In secret trials last week, the Army said it had made a vehicle completely disappear and predicted that an invisible tank would be ready for service by 2012. The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank.

The Language Of The Heart

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com So why did George W. Bush pick Karen Hughes for such a critical mission? Her words upon emerging from a meeting with an Egyptian sheikh provide one clue: "I think I was able to have a wonderful meeting with His Eminence to talk with him about the common language of the heart." We don't know what His Eminence thought about his introduction to the common language of the heart. But George W. Bush, who years earlier declared that he had seen into the soul of Vladimir Putin, speaks it fluently. Hughes knows Bush as well as anyone other than his wife. And when Bush needs help on the big issues, he often seeks assistance from those most familiar to him, whatever their qualifications and without regard to what the rest of world might think.

The Rubbish This Time

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com President Bush's plan regarding the Iraq war was audacious and risky. He wanted to prove that an Islamic country could be peaceful and democratic. In order for the project to succeed, the demands for peace and tolerance had to necessarily flow from the Iraqi people. It's amazing how poorly our media and politicians have grasped that last point. It's also more than a little odd. On the left, the most political muscle currently originates with the progressive "Netroots," a group that endlessly extols the importance of "people power." And on the right, the notion of an all-powerful central government dictating the way a society should function has long been anathema. And yet on all points along our political spectrum, there's an often explicit agreement that unless the Iraqi government rapidly transforms itself into an Arabic-speaking version of our Constitutional Congress, the surge will have been for naught. This is rubbish. Indeed, it's un-American rubbish.

Just Another Day At The Beach

clipped from michellemalkin.com “The evidence fails to establish or even suggest any innocent or wholesome explanation for the events that led to Megahed’s arrest,” Merryday wrote. “Guns, explosives, fuses, canisters of gasoline, ammunition, welding equipment, GPS devices, all-night interstate drives to an unstated and indeterminate destination, stops to check gun prices and availability, and computers with a recent history of visits to sites that feature the advocates and the means of violence are not attributes that a disinterested but cautious observer associates with a safe and tranquil citizen of the community,” the judge said. “Rather, a person about whom these attributes are discovered is a person whose means, motive and degree of determination are unknown and unpredictable and who is highly suspicious and threatening.” We’ve certainly come a long way from the innocent fireworks carriers looking for the beach scenario, haven’t we?

Just Another Misunderstanding I'm Sure...

clipped from timblair.net It ain’t so easy being a ex-Muslim in ever-tolerant multi-culti Europe: Ehsan Jami is an intelligent, softly-spoken 22 year-old council member for the Dutch Labour Party. He believes there should be no compromise, ever, on the rights of women and gay people and novelists and cartoonists. He became sick of hearing self-appointed Islamist organisations claiming to speak for him when they called for the banning of books and the “right” to abuse women. So he set up the Dutch Council of Ex-Muslims. Their manifesto called for secularism – and the end to the polite toleration of Islamist intolerance. As he put it: “We want people to be free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.” Sounds reasonable enough. How did Ehsan’s ex-religionists react? Ehsan was immediately threatened with death.

PC And The Fall Of Rome

clipped from rightcoast.typepad.com We are surely familiar with this situation in our own time. A sophisticated man of letters, disillusioned and even embittered by the flaws, inconsistencies, and retrogressions of a great civilization, deludes himself that a world of primitive innocence and natural goodness exists in peoples who are untouched by the advances of that civilization. So intense are his hostile feelings toward his own society that he is unable to see the one he compares it to with any degree of realism: whatever its actual qualities, it is endowed with all of the human values that he misses in his own. he sees his own culture not as an improvement on brutish natural human behavior but as a departure from a state of natural goodness. This recurring Western fantasy runs from Tacitus' idealized Germans all the way to such twentieth-century versions as Margaret Mead's sentimentalized Samoans and ultimately to one of the most far-reaching outbreaks of this illusion--the political correctness of our own day.

Laura Where The Sun Don't Shine

clipped from www.jpost.com As a Washington Post report of her trip to Saudi Arabia from last Thursday noted, there is a dire need in the kingdom to raise public awareness of breast cancer and its treatments. Due to social taboos, some 70 percent of breast cancer cases in Saudi Arabia are not reported until the late stages of the disease. It is possible that the local media attention that Mrs. Bush's visit aroused may work to save the lives of women whose husbands will now permit them to be screened for the disease and receive proper medical treatment for it in its early stages. And this is where the disturbing aspect of Mrs. Bush's visit enters the picture. During her public appearances, the First Lady limited her remarks to the issue of breast cancer awareness. Yet in the Persian Gulf, it is impossible to separate the issue of breast cancer or for that matter the very fact of the First Lady's visit from the issue of the systematic mistreatment and oppression of women in the Saudi Arabia

Caroline Glick does a bang up job on Laura Bush's disastrous "breast cancer awareness" misadventure in the Middle East. RTWT.

But not only is Laura off track politically and culturally in defending the abaya -- she's wrong medically.

You see, if Laura really wants Muslim women to lower their breast cancer rates, she'd be yanking off their abayas with a fervor.

Why?

Because the latest medical research now shows that Vitamin D is a key to fighting breast cancer. And can you guess what one of the most effective delivery regimens for Vitamin D is?

That's right: sunlight.

And how helpful is an abaya in helping women get that?

On That Missing European Re-armament

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security.... That is exactly right, I think. It is the luxury of knowing they are bullshitting that allows American liberals to claim that their freedoms are going up in smoke and that dissent is being suppressed, when in fact, "dissent" is socially mandated in polite society from Manhattan to Marin County. I would add this parallel: any survey of Europeans you look at will say that they think the United States is the biggest danger to world peace, worse than North Korea or the Islamofascists. But they don't mean it. If they did, they would be clamoring for their own countries to re-arm. But the very people who claim to believe that the U.S. is bent on world domination are the same ones who don't want their own governments to spend a dollar on defense.

APork

clipped from blogs.dailymail.com Those mean Republicans cut funding for the Woodstock museum. They really are against education. At least according to the Associated Press. In a bizarre story that pitted hippies and townspeople against those meany Republicans, AP reported that the plucky Woodstock nation would open the Woodstock museum despite those meany Republicans. Nyah. The Man can’t keep them down. Completely absent in the AP story is Alan Gerry, one of the co-founders of Woodstock. Now a billionaire, Gerry donated thousands to the campaigns of New York’s senators who, surprise, surprise, sponsored the $1 million pork barrel for Woodstock. The guy is worth at least 1,000 times that million. He could have forked it over and kept 99.9% of his wealth.

Supporting The People

clipped from instapundit.com THE RANGEL TAX BILL: Redistributing wealth from the "very rich" to people making between $200,000 and $500,000 a year! "Thus, as a first approximation, the plan increases the progressivity of the tax code by redistributing income from the very rich (e.g., CEOs, hedge fund managers, superstar athletes and actors) to the upper middle class (e.g., doctors, lawyers, congressmen)." Supporting the people, not the powerful!

Good grief.

Only 6' 6"?

clipped from www.mudvillegazette.com The narrative on Iraq - the one you see in the media, that is - is changing. Claims that "we've lost" and that American soldiers have been beaten by opponents who are righteous heroes or nine-foot tall and bullet proof are being quite subtly shifted to arguments that no potential victory (if even grudgingly acknowledged) could be worth the price. This argument may prove irresistible to those who've invested heavily in defeat. But the men profiled in this brief and focused story will soon head home (ironically, to Germany - where we've been for over 60 years now) and others will take their place here in Iraq. The war will continue to wind down. That next unit will write the story of what Sadiyah becomes, but only these few men of the Big Red One will own the story of what it took to make it so.

Welcome To The "Best"

clipped from www.lvrj.com Being a longtime political writer in the little Southern state of Arkansas positions one for a couple of insights into presidential politics. One is that we propel our candidates by the most superficial of judgments. The other is that we may as well do that, since there apparently isn't much political talent out there in the first place. In 1992, the national political reporters came around to ask about Bill Clinton. They said they'd never seen such pizzazz as he exhibited rallying from the woman and draft problems in New Hampshire. So I told them about this 12-year governor of Arkansas. Yes, he was a talented politician with an impressive mind and an engaging manner. But he was uncommonly indecisive and so averse to conflict that he'd tell everybody what they wanted to hear. He didn't so much lie outright as chop the truth into pieces. And there was that business about sexual misbehavior. I would ask, "So are you telling me that Bill Clinton is the best the Democrats have to offer?"

Googling Iraq

clipped from www.nypost.com Many local people are clearly fed up with the violence. Some even send e-mails with Google Earth maps showing exactly where suspects are, and they are doing it in real time. “We'll be sitting there in the TOC (tactical operations center or HQ) and an e-mail comes in and it's literally a map (or a photo of one) with detailed descriptions of wanted men and/or caches. And the information is turning out to be true. I have never seen anything like this before," Frank says. “It's becoming almost bizarre how specific the informants are becoming. Informants have called up saying they are with bad guys right now and giving their location. Our guys show up and arrest everyone. Hours later, the U.S. soldiers let the informants go. JAM and AQI are getting slammed in many areas because local people are sick of the violence and local people trust Americans to help them end it."

The Stench Of Al Qaeda Reprise

clipped from www.nypost.com Days after, an Iraqi man told me in a room full of American and Iraqi military officers, that al Qaeda had “invited" parents they wanted to “influence" to lunch, and then brought in the body of their baked son. I do not know if the stories were true, and no proof was offered, but other Iraqis in the area told similar stories and all seemed to believe it. And, of course, I had just seen the decapitated heads of children in al Hamira village and smelled their rotting bodies. The stench of al Qaeda will forever remain with me. The level of brutality against ordinary Iraqis throughout Diyala, often directed against women and children, is what prompted many Sunni insurgent militia groups to come forward and work with Coalition forces.

The Rejection

clipped from www.nypost.com All across Iraq, people are fed up with the abuse of power, When I was in the city of Hit this May, I saw firsthand a dramatic example. Many people in Hit directly attribute the resurrection of their city in large part to the courage of Iraqi Police General Ibrahim Hamid Jaza, who took an aggressive stand against the al Qaeda Iraq (AQI) terrorists who had brazenly made Anbar province a home base and slaughterhouse with their marketplace car bombs, beheadings and reputation for hiding bombs intended to kill parents in the corpses of dead children they'd gutted. Between shooting people for using the Internet, watching television or other “moral transgressions" such as smoking in public, AQI's claim of fundamentalist piety proved to be a thin veneer, quickly eroded by blatant drug, alcohol and prostitute use. The people of Anbar rejected AQI, but AQI was still strong and well-armed, so rejection was only a first step.

Marx, Zinn AndThe Real Gun Faith

clipped from www.americanthinker.com It's when the people refuse to freely cooperate that Marx gets angry.  At one point in the play, Marx growls that "we should praise the capitalist system for its amazing means of production -- and then TAKE IT OVER."  Zinn here gives voice to the same problem that confronted Lenin: it's really hard to be patient and wait for the revolution to spontaneously happen, as Marx predicted, when it's so easy to prod it along at the barrel of a gun.  Like Marx being resurrected from the dead, Marxists believe that politics can resurrect a man who seems to have been absent through all recorded human history.  Marx seems to have taken a cue from Rousseau, who believed that in his natural state, man was peaceful and unselfish.  This is an untestable and impossible-to-prove thesis. It's not a matter of empirical evidence-capitalism must degrade man, because communism is the prehistorical, proper way for man to live.  And he knows this on faith.