You'll catch a cold! And other lunacy ;)

How 'bout those German prosecutors and their witnesses? After reading this piece, it's hard to tell who most wants to suppress these goings on -- the U.S. press or the Bush administration...

Plan 9 for Appeasing WMD

"I'll bet we haven't seen the last of these weirdies." NON-OPTIONAL READING I'M VERY SORRY TO INFORM YOU.

You might as well turn around and walk back into the gas chambers...

Were those the Winchester Silver Tips?

The odd couple and the huge ring.

EEEEAAAAAGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! One Dem is clearly unhinged -- but we thankfully did get some evidence that not all the Iowa Dems are...

Clinton finds his niche?

WHOOPS!

Space may be waxed into waxing... (Hat tip Glenn.)

More liberal hawks.

Racing for help ;)

Move Along, Pay No Attention

"She is not going to be the last (attacker) because the march of resistance will continue until the Islamic flag is raised, not only over the minarets of Jerusalem, but over the whole universe." -- Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar

The libs will have you believe that we should pay no attention -- and they will even match the rhetoric of the loony right and say that they're just a bunch of stupid Arabs who can't be changed. So pay no attention.

Reprise the holocaust survivor's quote about what he learned from his experience: "When a man says he wants to kill you ... you should believe him."

Hat tip Hawkins for the pointer to the Zahar quote.

As a long-time seafood lover, I find this more than a little interesting as an object lesson in public health demagogery.

Shouting fire? Nope. Nada. Not. But don't you worry, it's really John Ashcroft who's going to get us. Yessiree. Not.

Trouble.

On avoiding ugliness.

Plus ca change.

Did Joseph Wilson drink enough tea?

Four Hundred and Fifty Miles

Check out this little gem:

From: Paul Berman
To: Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fred Kaplan, George Packer, Kenneth M. Pollack, Jacob Weisberg, and Fareed Zakaria
Subject: Hitler, Stalin, Hussein
Friday, Jan. 16, 2004, at 1:21 PM PT
A final footnote on the arcane topic of Hitler and Stalin. I do think we have reason to keep these historical figures in mind. Saddam's Baath was founded in 1943 under a Nazi influence. (This ought to give the Germans a reason to ensure Baathism's final defeat in Iraq, even if Bush has treated Germany with arrogance.) Later on, Saddam added an influence of Stalin to the Baathist idea. Fred Halliday has pointed out that Saddam's birthplace in Tikrit is a mere 450 miles from Stalin's birthplace. (This might give the Russians a reason to help out, too.) Saddam has the unusual quality of being able to claim descent from Hitler and Stalin both. He is himself the Hitler-Stalin pact.

This arcane fact goes to the heart of our modern predicament—the reality that large political forces exist that have demonized entire countries and populations and have worked up a cult of mass killing. The war against these political forces has been bungled by the strategists in Washington. But, as George and other journalists have shown, many heroic people are doing everything they can do to undo those blunders on the ground in Iraq. What should liberals and Democrats do at home in the United States? Everything we can to help those people. Their success and our safety are one and the same.

Bush isn't perfect. Duh-oh! Anyone home? But Bush is NOT Hitler -- but Saddam DEFINITELY is the heir to BOTH Hitler and Stalin's throne. Period. Paragraph. End of Story.

Fanatic mistake. Nice, Michael. And those pesky facts need to be ignored as quick as we can...

The masquerade...

Wall Nuts Meet the NutsHell

Totten makes Iraq simpler:

The reason we are fighting this war is not because nineteen hijackers crashed into a burning building and a handful of others cheered, but because the entire Muslim world not only cheered, but then turned around, pointed at "The Jews" and said that it was their fault, denied they ever did it, denied that it ever could be them, screamed that they hated us anyway, danced in the streets, printed up posters about the heroes who did the deed all while denying they ever really did, and then increased their threats to tell us that if they didn't get more capitulations that it would happen yet again.

A RIGHT FOUND IN NO ISLAMIC CONTROLLED NATION ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD

The ordinary is completely out of reach.

On the importance of bike paths. It turns out their relevance may have been underestimated ;)

No progress here. Move along. Nothing to see....

Fool Me Thrice

Read. This. Article.

UPDATE: And. This. Panel. Bubbles.

Friedman:

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Hitchens:

Pollack may have been led to overstate the immediate danger from WMD, but he did so on persuasive evidence that was supported by a long history of exorbitant behavior by the Baathists, and on a long history of culpable underreaction by Washington. (There was no comparable inquisition, as I recall, when the intelligence "community" failed to predict, and very nearly failed to report, the invasion of Kuwait. And the antiwar forces cling to their taunt on WMD because every other part of their propaganda and prediction has been utterly exploded.) That's if WMD ever were much of an argument in that quarter. I myself had a different experience from Pollack, in the run-up to the war. I had to debate, every week and sometimes every day, with anti-interventionists who said that Saddam's possession of WMD was a reason NOT to attack or attempt to depose him. I said that the threat was latent not blatant, and that the main "immediate" danger was an off-the-shelf purchase by Iraq from North Korea, and by the way I think I was right. But I was not an elected officeholder in a democratic government in a post-9/11 atmosphere. If I had been, I would certainly have decided to make the worst assumption about any report on Saddam's capacity for lethality, and I would have been operating at all times on the presumption of guilt. As a civilian, I would have wanted to criticize any Western government that did not err deliberately on this side.

Another way of phrasing this is to remember the line taken by the late Dr. David Kelly, sad subject of the Hutton inquiry in Britain. In an article written just before his death, this experienced inspector stated that you could have genuine inspections only by way of regime change. This essentially commonsensical view, which has been seconded by other veteran inspectors such as Rolf Ekeus and David Kay, takes account of the notorious Iraqi deception and concealment programs; the failure to comply at any point with U.N. resolutions; the sequestration of Iraqi scientists; and the preservation of secret funds, documents, and resources in Baghdad against the day when sanctions might be lifted and another bid for superpowerdom be made. Taken together with the secret bargaining (now exposed) with North Korea, this entitles us to speak of a Permanent Threat if not precisely an Imminent One. "Imminence" might have come when Saddam gave way to the Odai/Qusai regime: a prospect that need no longer concern us but that did not concern the antiwar forces even when it was a possibility.

Thus, we now can account more or less for Iraq's lunatic mixture of missing and undeclared weapons, and that in itself is an achievement. Moreover, the Iraqi economy and military are no longer at the disposal of a crime family with well-attested links to piracy and gangsterism, and that too is a gain. Dr. Howard Dean now tells that al-Qaida is in Iraq after all, but only because of President Bush. He is entitled as a private citizen to his touching belief that the connection began only a few months ago: One would not want a president to have been so insouciant if he had had to take the actual decision at the time, and once again I applaud the presumption of guilt, which was equally well-merited.

I love Hitchens writing not to speak of his content...

The perfect anti-Bush???

The attack of the retards.

Read "Wall Nuts" ...

... and get a very, very queasy feeling:

There's a quiet scandal at the heart of Sept. 11; one that for different reasons neither the government nor the privacy lobby really wants to talk about. It's this: For two and a half weeks before the attacks, the U.S. government knew the names of two hijackers. It knew they were al-Qaida killers and that they were already in the United States. In fact, the two were living openly under their own names, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. They used those names for financial transactions, flight school, to earn frequent flier miles, and to procure a California identity card.

Despite this paper trail, and despite having two and a half weeks to follow the scent, the FBI couldn't locate either man—at least not until Sept. 11, when they flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. If we had found them, there is a real possibility that most or all of the hijackings would have been prevented. The two shared addresses with Mohamed Atta, who flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who flew into the South Tower. They were linked to most of the other hijackers as well. So August 2001 offered our last chance to foil the attacks. And if we want to stop the next attack, we need to know what went wrong in August 2001. Despite all the resources of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, we did not find two known terrorists living openly. How could we have failed so badly in such a simple, desperate task?

We couldn't find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in August 2001 because we had imposed too many rules designed to protect against privacy abuses that were mainly theoretical. We missed our best chance to save the lives of 3,000 Americans because we spent more effort and imagination guarding against these theoretical privacy abuses than against terrorism.

I feel some responsibility for sending the government down that road.

In August 2001, the New York FBI intelligence agent looking for al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi didn't have the computer access needed to do the job alone. He requested help from the bureau's criminal investigators and was turned down. Acting on legal advice, FBI headquarters had refused to involve its criminal agents. In an e-mail to the New York agent, headquarters staff said: "If al-Midhar is located, the interview must be conducted by an intel[ligence] agent. A criminal agent CAN NOT be present at the interview. This case, in its entirety, is based on intel[ligence]. If at such time as information is developed indicating the existence of a substantial federal crime, that information will be passed over the wall according to the proper procedures and turned over for follow-up criminal investigation."

In a reply message, the New York agent protested the ban on using law enforcement resources for intelligence investigations in eerily prescient terms: "[S]ome day someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' Let's hope the [lawyers who gave the advice] will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama Bin Laden], is getting the most 'protection.' "

It breaks my heart to read this exchange. That "wall"—between intelligence and law enforcement—was put in place to protect against a hypothetical risk to civil liberties that might arise if domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence missions were allowed to mix. It was a post-Watergate fix meant to protect Americans, not kill them. In fact, in 1994, after I left my job as general counsel to the National Security Agency, I argued that the wall should be left in place because I accepted the broad assumption that foreign intelligence-gathering tolerates a degree of intrusiveness, harshness, and deceit that Americans do not want applied against themselves. I recognized at the time that these privacy risks were just abstract worries, but I accepted the conventional wisdom: "However theoretical the risks to civil liberties may be, they cannot be ignored." I foresaw many practical problems as well if the wall came down, and I argued for an approach that "preserves, perhaps even raises, the wall between the two communities."

I was wrong, but not alone, in assigning a high importance to theoretical privacy risks. In hindsight, that choice seems little short of feckless, for it made the failures of August and September 2001 nearly inevitable. In 2000 and 2001, the FBI office that handled al-Qaida wiretaps in the United States was thrown into turmoil because of the heights to which the wall had been raised. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, the body that oversees national security wiretaps, had ordered strict procedures to ensure that such wiretaps were not contaminated by law enforcement purposes. And when those procedures were not followed strictly, the court barred an FBI agent from the court because his affidavits did not fully list all contacts with law enforcement. This mushroomed into a privacy scandal that set the stage for 9/11.

In the spring and summer of 2001, with al-Qaida's preparations growing even more intense, the turmoil grew so bad that national security wiretaps were allowed to lapse—something that had never happened before. It isn't clear what intelligence we missed, but the loss of those wiretaps was treated as less troubling than the privacy scandal that now hung over the antiterrorism effort. The lesson was not lost on the rest of the bureau. According to a declassified Joint Intelligence Committee report on Sept. 11, "FBI personnel involved in FISA matters feared the fate of the agent who had been barred and began to avoid even the most pedestrian contact with personnel in criminal components of the Bureau or DOJ because it could result in intensive scrutiny by the Justice Department office that reviewed national security wiretaps and the FISA Court." [Emphasis added.]

So is Ashcroft a Nazi? Or are you the one who's actually uninformed and should be ashamed of yourself?

And this story isn't all over the front pages exactly why? I'm sure you have a perfectly good explanation that doesn't include the mainstream press being completely uninterested in the truth ...

ANOTHER CLASSIC JUST GOT ADDED OVER TO THE RIGHT. I QUOTED A LARGE PART OF THE ARTICLE BUT THAT DOESN'T EXCUSE YOU FROM READING THE WHOLE THING MULTIPLE TIMES LIKE I HAVE...

UPDATE: I don't think I linked to this -- rather relevant n'set pas? I'll give away the punchline: "You got some of us, but you didn't get all of us."

altermondialistes???

An update on the "so-called free world" and where the truth is...

More on the "if they can bury whole MIG fighters" so we have a hard time finding them problem. If this one pans out, I can predict the reaction now: these were just "lost" from all the stuff he used in the Iranian war and weren't an "imminent threat". Never mind that if you have so many WMD that you misplace them there just might be a problem worth noticing? Duh-oh!

That H.R. 4655 has turned out to be pretty darned inconvenient, hasn't it?

French dhimmi watch update: you know that French jetliner that went down in Egypt?

Everyone will understand ...

but by then it will be too late. UPDATE: You could have clicked thru from Totten below but I wasn't willing to take the risk of having you miss it anymore...

Needless to say, this just got added to the classics page. INCREDIBLY POWERFUL AND AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ. 'NUFF SAID.

Are you sincere?

No problem here -- just move along now, look away, no problem, it's definitely not a war, just a "police action" you see...

Susan Block, foaming rocket scientist.

How Hugh Shelton developed a taste for vodka.

... or excreted by ... and you won't be able to stop laughing.

Hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?

(Hat tip Darren.)

There are no Americans in Baghdad?

My boys are fascinated with dinosaurs. This may have been how they left us -- and how we may leave us. Mine the links -- very thought provoking...

A Kuru-like Plague?

Yeooouch! Check out Austin Bay:

Mad Howard's frantic, peptic rise to top dog in the Democratic pack exhibits similar symptoms, from his "unsteady" (retracted) crack about rebel flags to his hideous conspiratorial "hint" that President Bush knew in advance of 9-11, to his demand we deal with the Soviet Union (it's Russia now, Howard), to his huff that America is no safer with Saddam Hussein incarcerated, followed by his startling revelation that Job is his favorite book in the New Testament.

Imagine the monthlong jihad Maureen Dowd and other smirky national press pooh-bahs would have waged had Bush done a similar job on Job. [Emphasis added.]

Definitely a RTWT! Smiles abound...

WHOOPS? More Clinton lies?

We must explore the universe in order to reject it!

This is just outstanding -- just as Bush prepares to announce a return to space! Lileks rocks... Read it -- you need a good laugh.

Who are the Slovaks again?

Splitters! (Hat tip Glenn.)

Woe unto those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness . .

The Wall: Prelude.

It's finally bad enough that even Benny Morris is becoming conflicted.

Gurgling and gassing in the Baath tub...

The Bush tax cut made him do it...

I knew the day would come. I now have incontrovertible proof that Dennis Kucinich is smarter than everybody else.

Nuanced Dominoes

A nice job critiquing the Bush administration on Iraq by Ken Pollack. This is what reasoned critique based on historical perspective and unblinkered analysis looks like. I can't resist quoting his swing at the leftist's race-based arguments about democracy being impossible in the MidEast because they're just stupid Arabs:

It's not a matter of dominoes falling, it's something somewhat different. For the first time ever Arabs will be able to look at Iraq and see an Arab democracy. Often when we say democracy, Arabs hear Britney Spears, sex on TV, same-sex marriages and hip-hugger blue jeans. They know they don't want any of that. But once you get that first democracy formed in a region, it has a remarkable transformative effect. This is what the East Asian historians say about Japan. Fifteen, twenty years after the occupation of Japan was over, when there was a functional democracy in Japan, it changed a lot of perceptions throughout East Asia. For the first time East Asians could look at Japan and say "That's the kind of state that I could imagine living in."

Before Japan, East Asians thought about democracy the same way that Arabs do now. They thought of it as being an American or a European thing. Those were the only examples they had, and they knew they didn't want that. But then Japan came along and proved that you could build a democracy that was very different from a Western-style democracy. To me, Japan is more dissimilar from our form of democracy than Hosni Mubarak's Egypt is from our democracy. But it is a functional democracy that is consistent with Japan's values, traditions and history. And if we get it right in Iraq, for the first time there will be a democratic Arab state with a free-market economic system that will be consistent with Arab values, traditions and history.

He also says a number of critical things but does so in a level-headed and insightful way (Pollack served under Clinton BTW.) When I see one of the Dem candidates actually paying attention to someone like Pollack, then we'll have a race for the White House. Right now Lieberman is the only one with a clue. Otherwise the Dems are toast this go-round...

W is the one who's stupid? Uh huh...

Some entertaining perspective from Australia. (Hat tip Totten.)

Mandatory reading today from Michael Totten on the distinction between liberals and leftists. Well done with the good sense to include a classic Churchill quote.

The Trouble Threshold

Volokh has a fascinating summary of "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" by Abigail & Stephan Thernstrom. I've always pointed out that the concern with "white superiority" in academic achievement is actually quite ignorant and misses a critical point: Asian achievement outstrips white achievement by about the same amount that White achievement outstrips Black and Hispanic academic achievement! (Did you know that Asians constitute some 50% of the student body at Berkely and UCLA -- the most prestigious public institutions in California -- in spite of "swimming against" affirmative action and comprising less than 10% of California's population?)

Volokh quotes a review by Clarence Page that contains this nugget:

Among the most intriguing possible reasons for this disparity is an intriguing group difference in the way students measure their family's "trouble threshold," according to one study that the Thernstroms cite. The "trouble threshold" is the lowest grade that students think they can receive before their parents go volcanic with anger and start clamping down on TV time, etc. In the survey by Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University social scientist, published in his 1996 book, "Beyond the Classroom," most of the black and Hispanic students surveyed said they could avoid trouble at home as long as their grades stayed above C-minus.

Most of the whites, by contrast, said their parents would give them a hard time if their children came home with anything less than a B-minus.

By contrast, most of the Asian students, whether immigrant or native-born, said that their parents would be upset if they brought home anything less than an A-minus. [Emphasis from Volokh.]

In critique of this, my wife (whose background is in education) points out that Asians have a particularly high suicide rate perhaps derived from such standards! My counter is that too much ignorance leads to an unacceptably high homocide rate.

In the end, the world is not a simple place and lots of factors matter -- not least of which include nutrition and genetics. But I believe that downplaying the role of culture is wrong-headed in the extreme...

A Tale of Two Earthquakes

In one word. (Hat tip LGF.)

And a Happy New Year to everyone. And that would include best wishes to everyone, everywhere. Even Jacques Chirac. Although I better quit before I have second thoughts about Osama and Kim Jong Il. Whew, that was a close one...

Of tribes and soldiers... (Hat tip Kaplan.)

WHOOPS... And more shutting up in snail country. (Hat tip Glenn.)

Evidence to hold over their heads...

Can you say evil spitting hatred? I thought you could...

Totten provides a nice fisking of the man the Dems are empowering to commit suicide for them.

Hmmmmm. And then I realized the Dems have more reasons to sympathize with terrorists than I could have previously believed. Nihil-brained suicide is a common ethos for both of them!

Condescension panderama. Period. Paragraph. End of story.

More on planning for the postwar environment...

Of "arch foes" and where the heart of hatred really lies...

Merry Christmas!

Keep safe...

Insanity Makes for a Flexible Approach to Survival

Check this out:

Yesterday, Col. Gaddafi called on other “rogue states” to follow his dramatic example if they were to prevent “tragedy” from striking their nations. [Ed Note: Wow, how could you piss off the Islamofascists more than that?]

The move has led to widespread speculation about Col. Gaddafi’s motives, but largely overlooked has been the impact that Western intelligence co-operation could have in helping Col. Gaddafi suppress his hardline Islamic opponents. ...

Three other armed groups, the Islamic Movement of Martyrs, Libyan Jihad Movement and Islamic Movement for Change, are also battling Col. Gaddafi and at one point had “thousands, if not tens of thousands of supporters,” CSIS said.

As with most real-world situations, Whacky G probably has LOTS of motives for caving -- including us catching an incriminating shipment red-handed. And who could be surprised that not being pure enough for the Islamofascists is in the mix?

Rethinking GWB's relationship with evil. (Hat tip Totten.)

Rekindling the Code of Hammurabi

WOW.

A quick excerpt so you can't escape:

But goodness is, in my view and that of almost all ethicists, essentially bound up with freedom. We cannot praise a coerced virtue, nor blame an enforced crime. The very core of morality, enjoined by God himself in almost all religions, is the spontaneous assent to divine grace. Paradoxically, to enforce the law of good is to destroy it. Paradoxically, the freedom to do evil -- as long as it does not violate the right -- is required for the freedom to do good. The law of right is at its center the law of freedom, and is thus, paradoxically again, the only thing for which one can rightly resort to coercion and war. All of this is not to say that the law of good must bottle itself up within the individual and the closed community, and render itself impotent. Instead it means that the law of good must win the world the hard way, by the noncoercive means of persuasion, gifts, and the marketplace -- must win the population one by one by one. And it can only do so under the wing of the law of right.

Just WOW. If you don't read anything for the rest of the year then this needs to be the last thing you do... AND IT JUST GOT ADDED THE THE CLASSICS LINKS -- FITTINGLY, RIGHT NEXT TO THE "CHURCH OF THE LEFT"...

Needless to say, this will draw more analysis later...

The Big Hmmmm...

And luckily for the Fascifists there is once again absolutely no evidence that this will make us any safer or that it was linked in any way to the invasion of Iraq and the capture of Saddam. Not other than the fact the negotiations started as Iraq was invaded and the agreement came just after Saddam was captured. Move along now, nothing to see here...

And some self-indulgent writing -- on writing ;) Nice Keith, nice...

Time to link to a good fisking. Thanks Michael, I needed that...

The Task of Doing Nothing

Wretchard has some concise perspective to color your holiday contemplations:

But of the fate of the United Nations, little has been said. In hindsight, the UN succeeded admirably at the task of doing nothing. The Security Council, the functional core of the UN, was designed to create a permanent state of deadlock. This kept the Great Powers from conflict by freezing everything in place. But the avoidance of world war was purchased at the price of accepting a permanent state of misery and regional conflict. In the succeeding years, nearly 60 wars would come to the attention of the Security Council for resolution. It would act in only two: Korea 1950 and Kuwait 1991, the first by accidental Soviet absence, the second, after the multipolar system had already collapsed by the accession of the United States to global dominance. Ultimately the price proved too high. Under the shadow of the Cold War, itself a consequence of the stasis designed into the peace of 1945, petty tyrants multiplied, millions were oppressed, and the most backward ideologies flourished. The aircraft that destroyed the two World Trade Center towers figuratively started their flight in Yalta, flown by men born literally not very far from where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin pored over their maps. [Emphasis added.]

And he has a very smooth punchline so I won't give it away since the piece is a quick read -- AND A RTWT.

Agrily Biking -- Without Harley

Steyn is unbeatable today. It's really almost impossible to pick the best snippet but here's a shot:

Howard Dean catapulted himself from Vermont obscurity to national fame very ingeniously. His campaign was tonally brilliant. He was an angry peacenik, an aggressive defeatist, he got in-your-face about getting out of Iraq. The problem with pacifism as a political position is that it's too easy to seem wimpy, wussy, nancy-boyish, pantywaisty, milksopping, etc. In that sense, his fellow Democrat, Dennis Kucinich, has a pacifist mien: I'm not saying he's a pantywaist or milksop, but he comes over as a goofy nebbish, as the Zionist neocons would say. The main impact he's made on the Granite State electorate seems to be his lack of a girlfriend, which has prompted a New Hampshire Web site to try and find a date for him. Somehow one is not surprised to hear this. By contrast, when Howard Dean, shortish and stocky, comes out in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, he looks like Bruce Banner just before he turns into the Incredible Hulk, as if his head's about to explode out of his shirt collar. Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus, but Dr. Dean is Venusian in a very Martian way. He's full of anger.

But only for peripheral issues. Ask him serious questions about the president's key responsibilities--national security and foreign policy--and the passion drains away as it did with Chris Matthews. David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually became his thesis "Bobos in Paradise," concluded that the quintessential latté burg was "relatively apolitical." He's a smart guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of politics--pedestrianization, independent bookstores--is the politics. Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left. [Emphasis added.]

And I even left out the analysis of Dean not caring where Osama gets tried! RTWT. Period.

Russia, China and France: Open and Say Ahhhhhh...

Bill Hobbs hits one out of the park on the left's latest pygmy-brained retort to Saddam's capture:

It's one of the common refrains of the anti-war crowd, the claim that the United States "created" Saddam Hussein by providing him weaponry for the Iran-Iraq war. It's a lie. The three biggest sellers of arms to the Hussein regime from 1973 through 2002 were ... drumroll.... Russia, China and France, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Those three countries combined sold Saddam 82 percent of his weapons during that period. The United States sold him 1 percent. Chart here.

Remind me again - which members of the U.N. Security Council promised to veto any resolution authorizing the use of military force against Saddam Hussein? Oh, that's right. Russia. China. And France.

Thanks to Saddam's regime, Iraq owes billions to France, Germany and Russia. For what? For weapons and for components needed to develop weapons of mass destruction. A public trial may well allow the world see the real reason France, Germany and Russia actively opposed efforts to remove Saddam from power.

For that reason, I have a hunch France might try to derail a trial, perhaps by proposing Saddam be sent into exile to live out his days incommunicado under armed guard, in exchange for providing the world with information as to the whereabouts of the weapons of mass destruction, and a full accounting of the regime's trail of mass murder. France will argue that the information is more valuable than revenge via execution, and Russia and China will nod and agree with the proposal - but it will really be all about covering up their complicity in arming and propping up one of the worst mass-murdering tyrants in world history.

Come on now, open wide and say ahhhhhh...ggggggrrrrrrr. And don't choke on your foul-smelling spittle...

And Don't Forget al-Husseini

Found on Healing Iraq:

Adolf Eichmann was not a doctor (that was Josef Mengele). He was the SS officer who rounded up Jews from all over Europe and transported them to the death camps. Hitler decided on genocide after the urgings of Mohammed Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and organizer of the 1941 pro-Nazi coup d'etat in Iraq.

When the government of Israel -- on behalf of hundreds of thousands of its citizens who lost relatives to Eichmann's thugs or were themselves enslaved -- put Eichmann on trial after abducting him in Argentina, the international elite (the New York Times, the unanimous UN Security Council) howled in protest. Sound familiar? [Emphasis added.]

Don't forget "The Previous Jaw Dropper"...

Nice, Then, To See Him Found Like A Rat In A Hole

Hitch weighs in on Saddam's ignominious end:

HE had all his visitors body-searched and all his food tasted in advance. He was obsessed with hygiene and stray infections.

He wore a different uniform every day and built himself a vulgar palace in every city of his miserable country. Nice, then, to see him found like a rat in a hole, covered with grime, sprouting a dirty grey mane, and being shaven and combed for lice.

"He was in our minds at all times - and that was power, of a kind." These words, from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, convey a faint sense of the symbolic and practical importance of the fact that, today, we enter the post-Saddam epoch.

Try to imagine seeing his face on your front page every day for three decades, and hearing that voice and seeing that face every time you turned on the radio or TV.

Try to imagine being unable to escape from it when you went to the opera, the cinema, the theatre, or the football. For millions of Iraqis under 35, this indoctrination started at infant school, where lesson one was that Big Daddy was supreme, and could do what he liked to your or your family.

Kanan Makiya's brilliant profile of Ba'ath Party rule, The Republic of Fear, had a title that was, if anything, understated. In Baghdad in the old days, I knew people who said you could smell the fear. Others said no, you could taste it. The one who came closest said you could actually eat it.

Just the mention of the name was enough to bring a look into the eyes of almost any Iraqi: the look of a broken dog that is once again shown the whip. This is why I can't stand those who refer with a sneer to the courageous Iraqi opposition as "exiles".

THE risk of uttering the mildest criticism of Saddam entailed savage torture followed by brutal execution, with the same being visited upon your family.

Those thousands who fled Iraq had no guarantee they would not be followed by assassins and murdered overseas. Many were.

Those who remained were used as cannon fodder in crazy and destructive wars, or shovelled into mass graves.

He's not done yet -- so click through and RTWT. (Hat tip Totten.)

Consistency ...

... the hobgoblin of little minds:

QUOTE OF THE DAY I: "The French will always do exactly the opposite on what the United States wants regardless of what happens, so we're never going to have a consistent policy," - Howard Dean, 1998, arguing against exactly the kind of foreign policy he is now advocating.

And don't miss "YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" while you're there.

Where to Find Real Stupidity

And why it loses:

As we wait for the details behind Saddam's capture, want to know why we got Uday and Qusay? The reward was tempting. But the deciding factor for their unhappy host was more visceral: Saddam's boys smacked around his wife. At that point, our money and the promise of relocation abroad became irresistible. Uday and Qusay signed their own death warrants with a temper tantrum.

Hate and unquenchably bad manners. There are folks in this country that behave like that too -- and it's not surprising they wanted Saddam to remain in power...

Why not us too?

Wretchard dices...

Nothing new under the sun...

And Whittle Can Still Zing

Zzzzinngggg:

On September 12, 2001, we woke to a new world, a world where the chattering classes of the intellectual elites made a prediction: a prediction framing the upcoming fight, and the nature of the two opposing camps:

One of them was soft, decadent, a nation of braggarts and bullies, without the guts for a real fight, capable of dishing out pain but bound to cut and run like cowards when they were finally hit hard enough.

The other force was hard as nails, dedicated, unstoppable, unrelenting. Their belief in their ideology made them impervious to casualties, and they would bear any hardship and endure any pain and never, ever surrender until they had achieved total victory, for their revenge on the crimes done against them.

They could never be defeated, these people: never. Not with the cause they believed in. They would die, seemingly to the last man, to defend their ideology.

You know what? Turns out those preditions were completely, totally, astonishingly correct.

Merde!

I haven't been paying enough attention to Merde In France:

UPDATE: In an incredible display of hubris and French 'sophistication' (no, rather the lack thereof) a somber looking Dominique Villepin™ (he's a guy) just gave a point-by-point statement (live on LCI) of what must be done in Iraq now that Saddam is out of the picture. Aside from supplying port-a-potties, I have no idea how the French could help out in Iraq. Villepin, I don't want to see your face unless you are in a restaurant serving me grilled frogs legs with plenty of Tabasco sauce. Now scoot!

But with any luck Saddam might figure a way to drag Chirac into the crossfire during his interminable war crimes trials! Can you say "enemy"? I can now -- you'll admit it later ;)

Where To Begin?

The following beautiful little zinger from Christopher S. Johnson (Hat tip Glenn):

Dear Lord, where to begin? I find it savagely ironic that (1) people who claimed that Saddam Hussein was no threat to any other countries now think other countries should have a part in his trial, (2) people who want Iraqis to run their own affairs right now don't want them to run this trial and, (3) people actually think that the UN should try him for the crimes it consistently refused to do anything about.

Can you say Purrrrrrfect? I thought you could...

That Sinking Feeling

OJ is on a roll. The following was found on DemocraticUnderground.com:

Erik Latranyi: "Well, tha capture of Sadaam takes the 'failure to capture' issue off the table. Now that the economy is picking up (mall was packed yesterday), Iraq is getting better, prescription drugs on the way, education spending at an all-time high, no further terrorist attacks--what is left? Oh, yes, the capture of Bin Laden. If that happens, we are completely sunk."

Better slap the tinfoil hat back on there son -- it's the only thing left when money for the drug habit runs out...

INTERLUDE: Lifted from OpinionJournal:

Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Rant

"Yes, Halliburton is profiteering in Iraq--will apologists finally concede the point, now that a Pentagon audit finds overcharging?"--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 12

"The officials said Halliburton did not appear to have profited from overcharging for fuel, but had instead paid a subcontractor too much for the gasoline in the first place."--news story, New York Times, Dec. 12

MmmmHmmm. The all-knowing and pervasively evil Haliburton rules the earth and controls your subconscious. (Fade to noisy crinkling sounds...)

And Wretchard weighs in nicely...

Can You Say "Hypocrisy"?

Glenn has the real news angle on Saddam's surrender without a fight. Of course the truth is that none of this is about principle or even "oppression" by the West. It's about a power trip by tyrants who live in a 7th century world. Is Arafat wiring his kids to be suicide bombers? Horsepuckey pure and simple. They live in Paris than you very much...

And he also has a great email from Roger Simon that makes me smile from ear to ear:

I am here in Paris to research a new novel, celebrating the overthrow of Saddam with your one time Paris correspondent Nelson Ascher and journalist/novelist Nidra Poller and we would all like to say that atmosphere here tonight is that Chiraq is shaking in his boots and may be headed for Damascus to seek political asylum.

Those who think this laughable aren't paying attention. I do seem to recall a quote or some intel tidbit where Saddam was reputed to say something about tattling on those who didn't support him enough ;)

We're far from out of the woods yet but now the pall of fear has lifted maybe the intel will get strong enough to actually take on the Al Qaeda in Iraq. But I still think it will take years since I'm sure Osama commands a similar level of fear to to Saddam...

UPDATE: Darren Kaplan points out Strategy Pages prescient take on Task Force 121.

Totten on jerks. A heart-warming affirmation of the right of Judeo-Christian expression by an atheist.

NEWSFLASH: Saddam Taps Nidal -- And Then Taps Him For Good

AN ATTA BOY WHOOPS

Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

Hat tip Charles. And as Charles points out, this might be more than a little germane to the "mysterious" death of Abu Nidal in Baghdad in 2002...

But don't worry -- there's still no evidence! You can sleep easy at night. Safely bet your last dollar. First born. All of that. You betcha...

It's also true that Saddam never held a grudge against anyone. Absolutely not. Well not other than his assassination attempt against Bush 41. But surely that's irrelevant isn't it? (Soft crinkling sounds in the background ... Fade back to deep unconsciousness... )

UPDATE: And you need to read this too.

And now for the body slam while you're down on the mat:

But even if ailing, a veteran terrorist like Abu Nidal ought not to have needed to empty his magazine in order to end his life. If Iraqi security services helped him out, the question is why?

The official explanation could well be true. Saddam, like Nidal himself, does not require much evidence to take action against a suspected traitor.

But there is another plausible explanation. Nidal's specialty was airplane hijacking and sabotage. At least two Iraqi defectors have said Saddam maintained at Salman Pak, a military base 21 miles from Baghdad, a Boeing 707 on which "Islamicists" practiced hijackings.

Ziad Jarrah was at the controls when United Flight 93 crashed in Somerset County. He had come to Germany as a student in 1996, where his apartment was paid for by his great-uncle, Assam Omar Jarrah. Assam Jarrah has been identified by German intelligence as an operative for both the old East German secret police and the Abu Nidal organization. Assam disappeared two months before Sept. 11.

Could Saddam have been eliminating a piece in the chain of evidence linking him to the 9/11 attacks? Stay tuned.
[Emphasis added.]

Move along folks. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all. Just plug your nose and pretend that nothing has happened...

The only problem is that us rural folk distrust people who reinvent themselves.

Wretchard on being "Flat Broke". He's on a roll -- this one's pretty thought provoking too...

When not corruption, then this...

The Thunder Run

Are you kidding, sir? (login: laexaminer, password: laexaminer)

Proof positive that fiction can't match reality. And why Baghdad Bob's lies were a very, very stupid idea -- never ever get Americans really motivated against you...

Where are all the well adjusted suicide bombers?

And check out Pilar Rohola on combating Euro Judaeophobia. Orianna Falaci and Bridgette Bardot are not alone after all... (Hat tip Simon)

Pilar Rahola The most absurd thing is to watch leaders of the left today greet and celebrate Arab leaders, even when they are fundamentalists. For example, in the debates that followed the attacks of September 11, we heard an anti-American discourse here, pooh-poohing the victims, something which is in and of itself terrible ! And there were those who tried to downgrade—with that tawdry third-worldism which characterizes some circles of the left—the danger embodied in individuals like Bin Laden, who is, in fact, an authentic fascist. I believe that for the moment the world remains blind to the biggest totalitarianism of the twenty-first century, which is Islamic fundamentalism. Now we must prepare ourselves seriously to face this danger : For me, this totalitarianism is without any shadow of a doubt comparable to Stalinism and Nazism, the biggest scourges of the twentieth century.

Part Deux

from Julie. She starts like this:

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr published his Letter To An Anti-Zionist Friend: "Anti-Zionism is inherently anti-semitic, and ever will be. What is anti-Zionism? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews... because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-semitism." MLK - what a mensch! A saint in the street; a superman in the sack. And this being so, no reason at all to be envious of the Jews.

and it just gets better and better... (Hat tip Simon.)

Hitchens weighs in with an update...

And part 45781 "hardly exists".

I Am Your (Inanimate) Master -- You Feel Bad

And that should trump all other considerations. And maybe we will finally stamp out classicism once and for all while we're at it! (Hat Tip AnalPhilosopher.)

And part 45780.

Zionism reversed Jewish historical passivity to persecution and asserted the Jewish right to self-determination and independent survival. This is why anti-Zionists see it as a perversion of Jewish humanism. Zionism entails the difficulty of dealing with sometimes impossible moral dilemmas, which traditional Jewish passivity in the wake of historical persecution had never faced. By negating Zionism, the anti-semite is arguing that the Jew must always be the victim, for victims do no wrong and deserve our sympathy and support.

And we insist that America be a victim also. And what makes you think that 3,000 dead in the heart of your largest city gives you the right to respond? Victims have no rights...

Anti-Semitism Reprise (Part 45779)

It turns out that Pejman has identified that ala Nietzsche, there is "much stupidity to forget" regarding anti-semitism and Brian Leitner is working on a monopoly:

It is amusing that Leiter, a devoted Chomskyite, apparently forgets that Chomsky is, by training, a linguist. As such, one cannot help but think that if Chomsky really wanted to set up a relative comparison in his comment, he would have had the sophistication with language to do so. All of this makes Leiter's whitewashing of Chomsky's statement quite laughable, and reading a "comparison" into Chomsky's statement where Chomsky didn't even bother to set up a comparison himself is the height of either (a) dishonest rhetoric, or (b) an inability to read, and comprehend English.

Perhaps even this doesn't convince Leiter as to the holes in his logic. So let's try a thought experiment, courtesy of the debate engaged on this issue by the worthy and masterful Enthymeme (follow the first link in the post). Supposing that I said the following:

Anti-black prejudice scarcely exists now, though it did in the past.

Now, I have no doubt that Leiter would scream with rage at this remark. But what if my comments were defended by faithful Pejmanesque acolyte Nairb Retiel, who--eager to play Luke Skywalker to my Yoda-- blithely explains that compared to the past, which included black slavery, Jim Crow laws, "separate but equal," and lynchings, my statement is true? Would that satisfy Leiter? Doubtful. Nor should it--of course there remains prejudice against blacks, and what's more, I didn't set up a comparison or a relative statement in my hypothetical remarks. It would be thoroughly disingenuous for Nairb Retiel to do so, and to therefore whitewash my remarks. [Emphasis added]

A thing of beauty, no? DEFINITELY A RTWT...