James Dobson reviews 50 cent?

"And at what point do they receive a failing grade?"

Strategy Page on desperate measures.

"He was for the plaintiffs before he was against them!"

Way, Way Beyond "Heh" ... Dementia Territory In Fact

Glenn points to this BOWT entry as a "heh" today. I don't see how that even begins to describe it. Dementia patients that ask what time it is every 5 minutes are more with it than this. What the h*ll is sub-puerile nonsense like this doing in anything rumored to be a respectable publication like WaPo -- complete with editors no less?

Froomkin quoting Murtha as saying pulling out of Iraq will cause the terrorists to leave us alone followed by smirking dismissal Cheney's argument that "It is a dangerous illusion to suppose that another retreat by the civilized world would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone" as a straw man? That nobody is making this argument???

WaPo and Froomkin are literally demented themselves or have absolute confidence that their readers are enough so that they won't notice. The only good thing I can say is that it may be difficult for them to be both...

If Froomkin isn't old enough to be demented then smoking a lot of dope would be the likely alternative.

"MSMemory Hole" doesn't begin to describe this either. Not only have they sucked Orwell into his own Memory Hole, but their brains are at the epicenter of it.

I'm finally beginning to understand -- and it's scaring me. As C.S. Lewis said, the devil's greatest advantage is the belief he doesn't exist...

Virgins? What Virgins?

"The Admiral Emeritus once told me that the definition of disillusionment was watching your martial-arts instructor get his ass kicked in a country-western bar. Having one's commander surrender to the enemy when he and his ilk have sent dozens to kill themselves just to take out a few women and children in buses and pizzerias has to come in at least a close second on that scale. I wonder what Abu Rob's cohorts think of his sacrifice for the cause tonight."

Jeff's Rockin'

"In Kos’s world, there is no difference between US military and the regime of Saddam Hussein—between humiliation and rape rooms ; between the sanctioned use of WP against entrenched terrorists and the use of nerve agents and WP on Kurdish civilians; between fighting to free a people and fighting to keep them subjugated.

Such moral relativism is not clever or nuanced, though it likes to pretend to be. Instead, it is obfuscatory for the sake of personal aggrandizement: Kos and his ilk like to play as the conscience of the country, but what they are, really, are the kinds of intellectually feeble brats who have come to take for granted the very system they hope to tear down. "

To which I would add: generally drug-laced too. And probably buying it from the mullahs ...

More On That CNN X-Rating...

Cheney gets MSMemory Holed once "again" by the MSMedia MSMorons. If you haven't read Goldstein's take on this -- including Cheney's well done speech itself -- you need to. The reason Cheney got the CNN X-Rating is that no lefties could possibly read it with due consideration without their brains actually melting. He's terminally nice in fact. But his intentions aren't good you see...

Did I mention that I consider Bush and Cheney both to be liberal softies?

But then that's why they're elected and I'm not. Well other than the obvious fact that anyone smart enough to be a principled politician is smart enough not to drag his family through a hellish cesspool of hateful garbage that in fact has no principles involved whatsoever on most days lately...

"What's wrong with this picture?"

"I would rather lose the presidency and win the war than the reverse."

Hillary out of step again...

"Matthews' enemy is the Bush administration, and he clearly doesn't understand its point of view. "

StrategyPage on Iraq beyond the Newspeak...

This story doesn't exist ... and neither do our borders...

The latest subliminal Newspeak from the Communist Neo-Syndicalist News Network. But don't worry ... now what was I saying again?

"Be ready to fight for it. "

"The most amazing part of all of this to me is that when the Clinton administration launched Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, Saddam's response was to quickly dispatch his top intelligence operative to bin Laden. Bin Laden then issued a condemnation of the U.S.-led air strikes and called on Muslims to retaliate against British and American targets. We know this because the worldwide media reported [it]. So, when you write, "it's not surprising that Saddam saw al Qaeda as a vehicle through which he could operate outside of his box," I think you are right in ways many will never admit."

"It's scary to think that Scheuer could have been the chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit at its Counterterrorist Center. It's even scarier to think that his policy views may well reflect the agency's. "

TODAY'S REID DEMENTIA UPDATE: It's just beyond bizarre that the Dems are letting Harry lead them over this cliff.

McQ On Peters and Lieberman

You really need to read this. The whole thing. Here's at taste of the Peters snippets:

For God's sake, don't talk about democracy in the Middle East. After all, democracy wasn't much fun for the Dems in 2000 or 2004. Why support it overseas, when it's been so disappointing at home?

Human rights? Oh, dear. Human rights are for rich white people who live in Malibu. Unless you can use the issue to whack Republicans. Otherwise, brown, black or yellow people can die by the millions. Dean, Reid & Pelosi, LLC, won't say, "Boo!"

You've got to understand, my fellow citizens: None of this matters. And you don't matter, either. All that matters is scoring political points. Let the world burn. Let the massacres run on. Let the terrorists acquire WMD. Just give the Bush administration a big black eye and we'll call that a win.

Don't worry, I haven't given away the best stuff either.

And Lieberman -- apparently the only remaining non-amnesiac in the Dem party -- seems to recall something about a beach or the water's edge or something too...

"Vintage Bubba."

"IT IS TIME TO HAVE A SERIOUS BI-PARTISAN DEBATE ON BRINGING THEM HOME." (HT Glenn)

"He is a small piece of a large problem..."

I'm tired too!

Barone Has It Nutshelled

"Now, the progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results -- the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya's giving up WMDs, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi's recent suicide attacks and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia. In Syria, The Washington Post's David Ignatius reports, "people talk politics here with a passion I haven't heard since the 1980s in Eastern Europe. They're writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950s."

Almost surely none of this would have happened without the liberation of Iraq. And there democracy goes forward: Seventy-eight percent voted for the Constitution last month, and democratic parties are contesting the elections to be held next month.

Against this backdrop, mainstream media headlined the call for withdrawal of Democratic Rep. John Murtha, who has long been skeptical about the war. The propagators of the big lie against President Bush are trying to delegitimize not only him, but also all the progress that has been made as a result of Iraq, progress both toward freedom for Middle Easterners and toward a Middle East that will no longer threaten the United States. "

" ... in the only place he could shine a beam."

DebkaFile on Zarqawi

Debka is typically questionable in its reliability. But there's something worth posting today:



Zarqawi is an incompetent or a clear butcher if Debka is right. If they're spinning fantasies as they often do, Z-man is just about 2 orders of magnitude worse of an "oppressor" of Muslims than the legions of moonbats around the world accuse the U.S. of being.

This guy is nuttier than a Cuckoo Clock. And people who would consider giving him even a nanometer are also. Nuff said.

Oops, Sorry!

"Zarqawi wants Muslims to believe that sending two "agents" into a ballroom obviously occupied by a wedding reception, positioning themselves to maximize the damage, and then exploding themselves to kill as many as possible amounts to some kind of unforeseen error. All he proves is that he isn't terribly bright or reliable when it comes to picking his targets. Nor would he care if the end result destabilized Jordan enough for King Abdullah to either flee or agree to ally with Zarqawi. Like most sociopathic monsters, he's only sorry to the degree that his crime backfired on him, and only apologizes to the extent that he's sorry that others cannot recognize his overall genius."

Somehow, I'm not recognizing the overall genius of our "Democrats against democracy" party either...

"No, really -- we didn't want the bomb. It came automatically whenever anyone purchased their first 1,000 centrifuges! Only an idiot would believe that the Khan network just blithely handed out that kind of information unsolicited, and only the Iranians would believe the West to be precisely that stupid. Meanwhile, the Iranians showed their embarrassment at having been caught by the IAEA in another lie by announcing their intent to continue processing uranium."

"What's his objection again?"

Read the SGT.

Did Bush Lie?

You can check it out yourself... (HT Michelle)

Page 134. Oh, and Clarke's opinions may be rather confusing to lefties about the Oklahoma City bombing. Well, if they actually had brains enough to actually read anything that is...

Silver Stars down the MSMemory Hole... Where else?

"Unless, by "competent" you mean "able to cow the Iraqi civilian population"."

"As I recall, Marshal Petain managed to prostrate himself right quickly before the Nazis despite his status as a WWI hero, too. Besides, where exactly will Murtha draw that line -- New York City? Logan Airport?"

"Have a nice day."

"I intend to cross the Rappahanock River with the Army of Potomac and engage the Army of Northern Virginia and keep them continuously engaged until they are destroyed or surrendered."

"It seems to me that the Left's position is inconsistent: if WP rounds are WMD, then Saddam clearly had massive WMD stockpiles, and the war was justified."

Freeh is on ABLE!

"The Able Danger intelligence, if confirmed, is undoubtedly the most relevant fact of the entire post-9/11 inquiry. Even the most junior investigator would immediately know that the name and photo ID of Atta in 2000 is precisely the kind of tactical intelligence the FBI has many times employed to prevent attacks and arrest terrorists. Yet the 9/11 Commission inexplicably concluded that it "was not historically significant." This astounding conclusion--in combination with the failure to investigate Able Danger and incorporate it into its findings--raises serious challenges to the commission's credibility and, if the facts prove out, might just render the commission historically insignificant itself." (HT Glenn)

"The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history."

Pallorous amnesiac talks about the final last chance ... until the next one ... and the next ... and yet another ...

Go To FrontPage Now!

Here's how. Here's why:

"FP: So do you think the WMD is the central issue regarding Iraq?

Tierney: No, and it never should have been an issue. The First Gulf War -- and I use this term as a convention, since this is actually all the same war -- was a prime example of managing war instead of waging it. Instead of telling Saddam to get out of Kuwait or we will push him out, we should have said to get out of Kuwait or we will remove him from power. As it was, we were projecting our respect for human life on Saddam, when actually, from his point of view, we were doing him a favor by killing mostly Shi’ite military members who were a threat to his regime. I realize that Saudi Arabia, our host, did not want a change in government in Iraq, and they had helped us bring down the Soviet Union with oil price manipulation, but we should have bent them to our will instead of vice versa. Saddam would not have risked losing power to keep Kuwait, and we could have avoided this whole ordeal.

We topped one mistake with another, expecting Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party, a criminal syndicate masquerading as a political party, to abide by any arms control agreement. Gun control and Arms control both arise from the “mankind is good” worldview. If you control the environment, i.e. get rid of the guns, then man’s natural goodness will rise to the surface. I hope it is evidence after more than a decade of Iraqi intransigence how foolish this position is. The sobering fact is that if a nation feels it is in their best interest to have certain weapons, they are going to have them. Chemical weapons were critical to warding off hoards of Iranian fighters, and the Iraqis knew they would always be in a position of weakness against Israel without nuclear weapons. The United States kept nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union, but we would deny the same logic for Iraq?

There is also the practicality of weapons inspections/weapons hunts. After seventeen resolutions pleading with the Iraqis to be nice, the light bulb still didn’t go off that the entire concept is fundamentally flawed. Would you like to live in a city where the police chief sent out resolutions to criminals to play nice, instead of taking them off the streets? "

(HT Power Line)

Scrappleface has pretty much all you need to know about the Plame fiasco. You'll never laugh harder!

The tri-partisan effort.

"Once again, it looks like the Republicans have hit the Democrats in the fist with their mouth."

Not to say that ignoring economics doesn't play a role. N'est pas?

"Paris burns anyway. As the French seem to learn every 70 years, appeasement does not work. It merely whets the appetite. And the angry alien young were already hungry."

Five questions.

Giving new meaning to predation...

On Setting Them Free

DETAILS, DETAILS DEPT: "There are important consequences of a prisoner of war designation that have nothing to do with the humane treatment that all detainees receive. For example, the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention provides legal immunity for precapture warlike acts. This means that there could be no future prosecution of terrorists who are deemed to be prisoners of war." OOPS.

So. We finally come to incontrovertible proof that liberals are actually not even in favor of prosecuting terrorists as criminals. They just want to set them free!

Of course, most of them haven't even read Geneva to know it. But you can guess what I think of the ones that actually have...

EURABIAN DEATH SPIRAL DEJA VU REDUX: "Actually, refer back to my college sophomores point. One’s not ready to be a parent until one is ready to stop being a child."

HE'S BAAACK: "Their current claim to have been fooled or deceived makes them out, on their own account, to be highly dumb and gullible. But as dumb and gullible as that?" This is one of Hitch's finest tinfoil hat vaporizations ever!

A winning strategy (for us that is).

"The French won't do anything and soon, we will be in the majority here."

Did I forget to mention that they had no pre-war intelligence? Nil. Nada. Nihilists one and all...

Today's Wanton Ways

Z on the defensive finally? That -- at last -- the wanton destruction of "innocent" PALESTINIANS causes long, long overdue self examination tells you all you need to know. In fact, I think it's SO long overdue that it will soon be forgotten due to the burden of sustaining its novelty.

[ wanton: behave extremely cruelly and brutally ]

And Over To Roger

"I'm beginning to hope the traditionalists who think this is all about poverty and racism and not at all about rolling history back to 1492 are right. Because if they're wrong, this is not going to be over for a long time. The problem with the traditionalist's argument is that it is a tad racist in and of itself. It assumes these "youths" are ignorant of the demographics of the country they are living in and of the rudimentary history of Christianity and Islam. As they say in France, je m'en doute."

Apocalypse Warren In Due Course

"Soon, the average age in Europe will be beyond childbearing. Among non-Muslim Europeans, i[t] probably already is. We can no longer dream of a recovery. Europe has leapt. New immigrants are taking possession of the continent, transforming it, as in the "Dark Ages". Rome will be sacked again, in due course."

Today's Residue Update

"Yes, the student behavior was somewhat offensive. But the black gangsta identity—the glorification of drug-dealing, crime, and serial sexual conquest, coupled with a blithe rationalization of fatherless black children—is what really deserves condemnation and concern, and not just in black barbershops, churches, and homes. Bill Cosby excepted, however, few have raised public concerns when blacks outfit themselves in the sartorial and ethical drapery of common street hustlers. Many young blacks walk around saying n**** this, n**** that, but then take offense when others borrow the attendant stylistic signifiers, which our culture foolishly condones and celebrates as black authenticity."

Amnesia, Part 4,984,765

You may think that Bush is Hitler. You believe it with every fiber of your body. And you are passionately in favor of gun control. That would make you an amnesiac at best...

BusHitler has some comments on amnesia today as well. Finally.

"Complexity kills."

"I don't know, but it's surprising the extent to which people who routinely make the Halliburton and chickenhawk slurs seem to require much greater delicacy from others."

VDH Again...

"Second, for all our pride, we are not like the once-powerful — and scary — Soviet Union, so Latin Americans and Europeans know that there is rarely any price to be paid for attacking the United States. Slandering us is a win-win situation — cowardly and expedient to be sure, but hardly like indicting bin Laden or embargoing Iranian oil. No Argentinean is furious over Chinese unfair trade; no Spaniard protests Russian oilmen for spoiling the arctic. And worse still, we know why."

MSMemory Hole? Or just ADHD?: "Who could that be? Don't count on the Times or the Post to find that out for you."

France on fire...

“We’re Dumber than Bush!”?

"(God forbid the congressional darlings have to work on a Saturday)"

So The NYeT

covers W's speech (finally) going after the 5th column Dhimmis today and here's how it ends:



In my opinion, that's pretty much all you need to know...

"Or is Scheuer the biggest liar since Joe Wilson?"

What If They Held A War And Only One Side Came?

"But having said that, I do think that what's pathetic about all Western countries, including the United States, including France, including Canada, and a lot of other countries, is that they make these sort of high school sophist arguments about terrorism, as if it's some sort of theoretical debate. It's not. We're dealing with a very difficult situation here. And if you accord to terrorists all the rights of somebody who gets arrested for holding up a liquor store in Des Moines, you are going to lose to the terrorists, because when you accord them the full rights of somebody who is a criminal, you make it impossible to prosecute this as a war, which is what it is. "

Sick French Accidents

"Now, Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist group that with the neo-Gaullists, makes up Jacques Chirac's presidential majority, describes France as a "sick state, a state swollen into impotence" with "a democracy that doesn't work well." This means, he said, that "reality never enters political discussions."

But asked why the riots were happening here, since France's neighbors seemed to be escaping its misery, Bayrou offered a general response that, like the answers of the other politicians he condemned, hid from the specifics of both responsibilities and solution:

"As long as French democracy doesn't change," Bayrou said, "these accidents are going to continue." He left it there. "

Unless it's Iraq, of course...

The next worst. But close enough it doesn't matter methinks...

Warren Again

"It is against this background reality, that the riots happening today across France must be considered. They are a turning point, not only in France but all Europe. For the “moral and demographic vacuum” I mentioned above, is not in France alone. The same cultural deathwish prevails in Spain, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, Scandinavia -- and Canada, by the way. It is called “multiculturalism” in this generation, but in another generation will be called something else."

RTWT. It's short but action packed.

UPDATE: And check out QandO's commentary on Warren: "The French role? Pay for this time they need to organize and they will pretend, for a while, that the French are still in charge. And the French, if history is any indicator, are particularly adept at this role."

MSMemory ***Holes on the stand soon: "Oh, she is going to be one fine witness for the defense."

The Heart Of Nihilism ... Is Nothing

"Unless the invertebrates in charge can grow spines, France seems poised to become what Spain was before Ferdinand and Isabella, a patchwork of principalities where Moors ruled some communities, Christians others, with constant tension between them. It seems inconceivable that a civilized Western nation would bargain away to a handful of thugs its democratic principles and sovereignty over much of its territory.

But the Islamists may well succeed. For though what the Islamists believe in is vile and reactionary, it is something. The French believe in nothing."

Wow -- Blankley Is The Oracle Of Apocalypse

"As Paul Belien, writing from Brussels this weekend observed: "It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularized welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The "youths" do not blame the French, they despise them."

The Ambiguous Apocalypse

"Meanwhile, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, has issued a fatwa declaring: “It is formally forbidden to any Muslim seeking divine grace and satisfaction to participate in any action that blindly hits private or public property or could constitute an attack on someone’s life.” There is a strange ambiguity in this, recalling that of the CAIR-backed American fatwa condemning attacks on innocent civilians without defining “innocent”: what constitutes attacking “blindly”? Is a focused, targeted attack somehow acceptable?

The time for such ambiguity is long past. And indeed, lines are being drawn everywhere."

"One wonders why they have suddenly developed amnesia about it now." I don't. I call it the MSMemory Hole...

It looks like the infiltration is working fine.

"EVERY MUSLIM LIVES UNDER A PERMANENT DEATH THREAT."

STEYN: A New Dark Ages. (He forgot to wonder about the French H-Bombs though...)

Demarche Has Today's Eurabian Apocalypse Update

"It's like Baghdad here! It's the Apocalypse!" ...

"These riots may yet be put down without serious loss of life, but they are a glimpse of the future that awaits Europe. The youth who shouted out the phrase that is the title of this piece is sorely mistaken. Baghdad is on its way to recovery- Europe is on the slippery path to suicide by appeasement."

Go read it all...

Youths Islamofascists Torched An Ambulance

Roger points out that the Islamofascist violence is not abating in France:

Widespread riots across impoverished areas of France took a malevolent turn in a ninth night of violence, as youths torched an ambulance and stoned medical workers coming to the aid of a sick person. Authorities arrested more than 200 people, an unprecedented sweep since the beginning of the unrest.

And did I forget to mention that 9,000 police cars have been stoned in France since the beginning of the year? 9,000!?

Oh, and they set a disabled woman on fire. Because they feel "oppressed" you see. C'est la vie...

Look down just a few posts to:

It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.

Killing or even attempting to injure medical personnel in the act of rescue is nihilism pure and simple. The irony is that rationality would easily argue that anyone attacking medical personnel should either be killed on sight or immediately whisked into a rubber room.

And it exposes the great Catch-22 of the advance of civilization: We've somehow advanced to the point where the best of our societies have their lives constantly at risk to help save nihilists. Because they truly believe that nobody is beyond the reach of being "saved". And the very success of our best via these heroic acts helps foster the very dependence that is a -- probably the -- critical root cause of nihilism.

And why do they perceive ambulances as evil? Because as PALLYWOOD makes clear, they themselves use them as mere props -- if not actual instruments of terror.

"Recent newspaper stories report how imams and community "mothers" have been marching against the violence, only to have themselves stoned and jeered. De Villepin unleashed his ultimate weapon and it turned out to be a rubber sword.

What de Villepin's planning probably missed was that the millet system plus the Internet formed a combination that would go through the 21st century "impassable Ardennes" like s..t through a goose. The millet system meant that potentially hostile foci were were already pre-deployed outside the cordon, often in cities outside Paris. And the Internet of course ensured that command and control could be exercised at a distance by command cells despite any number of deployed riot police. My guess is that by day 6 or 7 the French leadership began to doubt whether their impenetrable defenses would hold. By 9th day, I think, a real panic had begun to set in and they are now scrambling for a Plan B."

BEST QUOTE HEARD SO FAR TODAY: "Often wrong but never uncertain."

March, 1939?

The Root Of The French Fried Fires

"They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning-the only possible meaning-to their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident."

UPDATE: Here's the non-signup link to the Taheri article you should have read by now.

'... the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the "occupied territories"'

Day By Day delivers this week's knock-out blow:

ORWELL SPINNING IN HIS GRAVE DEPT: "Aside from protecting us at the front and the rear, our great leader Kim Jong Il, the benevolent father of the people, showed us mercy by filtering the water. And, in order to help and care about the health of our people, he progressively practiced appropriate measures. Now, in North Korea, the land of pure hope, the people can gracefully drink clean water through the endless love of the great leader comrade Kim Jong Il." (HT Publius)

(C)BS Update: Mary my better.

What the hell-ABLE? Over?

"But this is France."

UPDATE: "Sadek has learned how to be French. He is the perfect Frenchman. The path ahead is tough- and he quit. Fight the Nazis? Non, too hard. Carry groceries up stairs? Merde! J'ai stoppé."

AND I WOULD TOP THIS BUT I CAN'T: From his hospital bed, Le Pew issued an apology to the Parisian cat community, explaining that "I am to be walking in zee park one day, in ze merry merry month of Mai," and "Pepe, he is to thinking this feline girl, she is un belle skunk femme fatale, no?"

"C.S. Lewis once said that the greatest advantage that the devil has is the belief that he doesn't exist."

Darn, and I was so sure listening to the lefties that being high and dry in Colorado would be such a good real estate investment...

"Precisely those who do not recognize Israel's right to exist have been opposed to the birth of an independent Palestinian state. Such as happened in 1948 when, in order to prevent the Jewish state from seeing the light of day, they only prevented the creation of the Palestinian state foreseen in 1947 by UN Resolution 181. And why did Jordan, instead of annexing Cisjordan in 1949 and Egypt, instead of governing the Gaza Strip in 1967, never agree to have a Palestinian state in those territories?"

"The First Amendment specifically protected the free exercise of political speech, and yet under the BCRA the First Amendment now offers more protection to nude dancing and pornography than it does to political candidates who want to communicate with prospective constituents."

"These are not simply American claims, they are also the official positions of the Egyptian, Algerian, and Saudi governments."