A View from the Eye of the Storm

Don't. Miss. It. Courtesy Spock.

Secondary explosions, elections, etc.

Reagan, Multi-Lateralist

"What kind of people do we think we are? Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well." -- The formerly stupid, hateful, warmonger Ronald Reagan who is now portrayed as an easy-going, tolerant team-player in order to contrast how stupid and hateful George Bush is now...

Where did the quote come from? From a speech by Joe Lieberman. What? A Democrat quoting Reagan? Yes -- that's right -- an honest Dem so not a prayer in h-e-double hockey sticks that he would be allowed within a light-year of the White House any more...

Don't become a defenestrated flibbertigibbet!

On Investigating

The 911 commission! I'm still completely amazed that Jamie Gorelick -- the implementer of "the wall" -- is on the commission rather than being its chief subject.

Spock applies non-local logic to Reagan's critics -- and it ain't a very pretty showing by the teleologists needless to say...

And dovetails nicely with my previous post on Reagan revisionism.

European Rocket Scientists

Lifted whole from Best of the Web since I still can't even begin to absorb this and it is the only way you can't avoid seeing it for yourself:

Belgian Justice

"A Belgian jury on Thursday convicted a former electrician of kidnapping, raping and killing girls eight years ago, ending an agonizing 16-week trial and closing the book on one of the most disturbing criminal cases in the country's history," the New York Times reports from Paris:

Marc Dutroux, 47, faces a life sentence for the abduction, abuse and deaths of four girls, two of whom were apparently drugged, wrapped in plastic and buried alive. The other two died of starvation in an underground chamber where he left them while serving a three-month sentence for car theft.

Mr. Dutroux was also found guilty of kidnapping and raping two girls who survived. Their testimony and their return with the jury to the dungeon where they had been held provided the most dramatic moments of the trial.

Because he committed these horrific crimes in Europe, Dutroux won't get the death penalty. That would be "barbaric."

Nuance finally understood... Sorry it took me so long.

Reprise

With all the liberal re-writing of history going on about how Reagan was a multi-lateral pacifist compared to the evil GWB -- here's the antidote from Andrew.

To repeat: The future is known, it's the past that's always changing. (An old Soviet "saying of the people" second only perhaps to "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.")

Quotes of the Day

Some memorable quotes from Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004), 40th President of the United States:

"A leader, once convinced a particular course of action is the right one, must have the determination to stick with it and be undaunted when the going gets rough."
-- December 5, 1990

"I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other."
-- April 11, 1984

"... there is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."
-- January 21, 1981

The price of blood.

The future is known, it's the past that keeps changing...

Careful what you ask for...

I remember,

and therefore I will resist.

U.N.: The cultural relativism of kickbacks...

Terrorism breeds poverty...

WHOOPS AGAIN. Let's see now. There are no banned weapons or WMDs in Iraq. Because they're being shipped out. Before the inspectors can find them for the last year. Oh, and there's so many of them still there that terrorists are using them by accident. And we can't find them. Because there are so many conventional weapons that we can't sort through them all to find the WMDs. And Saddam shot at our no-fly patrols most days and ran terrorist training camps. But they were just for "secular" terrorists. Ummmhhhmmm...

Quote of the Day

"In a democracy it is real hard to get a majority vote from people you despise." -- on why leftists seem to have trouble winning...

Reagan Dies...

...but here's just one example of why he lives.

OK then, Chirac is certainly right that history never repeats itself. Ummmhhhhmmmmmm....

What there is consists only in the negation of the present...

The haircut with a person attached...

Of oil sands and coal gasification.

And all it must defeat.

Productive lives of service and charity?

There it is:

As we fight the war on terror in Iraq and on other fronts, we must keep in mind the nature of the enemy. No act of America explains terrorist violence, and no concession of America could appease it. The terrorists who attacked our country on September the 11th, 2001 were not protesting our policies. They were protesting our existence. Some say that by fighting the terrorists abroad since September the 11th, we only stir up a hornet's nest. But the terrorists who struck that day were stirred up already. (Applause.) If America were not fighting terrorists in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere, what would these thousands of killers do, suddenly begin leading productive lives of service and charity? (Laughter.) Would the terrorists who beheaded an American on camera just be quiet, peaceful citizens if America had not liberated Iraq? We are dealing here with killers who have made the death of Americans the calling of their lives. And America has made a decision about these terrorists: Instead of waiting for them to strike again in our midst, we will take this fight to the enemy. (Applause.)

Time for the Innovator's Solution...

Britain Doomed!

Tell me when your people vote in free elections... Go Irshad!

Memo to Osama, part the first.

UPDATE: And the second.

Obviously, the lead prosecutor of the WTC I bombing knows nothing. Oh, really?

Blood must ink the presses...

More from the "fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq is a distraction from the war on Al Qaeda" department.

No Evidence? (part 34867)

Darling on Hayes on no evidence. This is one of those posts you don't want to miss -- long and information packed...

Here's a favorite:

Five months later, the same Richard Clarke who would one day claim that there was "absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever," told the Washington Post that the U.S. government was "sure" that Iraq was behind the production of the chemical weapons precursor at the al Shifa plant. "Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at al Shifa or what happened to it," wrote Post reporter Vernon Loeb, in an article published January 23, 1999. "But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to al Shifa's current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts, and the National Islamic Front in Sudan."

And another:

Later in 1999, the Congressional Research Service published a report on the psychology of terrorism. The report created a stir in May 2002 when critics of President Bush cited it to suggest that his administration should have given more thought to suicide hijackings. On page 7 of the 178-page document was a passage about a possible al Qaeda attack on Washington, D.C., that "could take several forms." In one scenario, "suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House."

A network anchor wondered if it was possible that the White House had somehow missed the report. A senator cited it in calling for an investigation into the 9/11 attacks. A journalist read excerpts to the secretary of defense and raised a familiar question: "What did you know and when did you know it?"

But another passage of the same report has gone largely unnoticed. Two paragraphs before, also on page 7, is this: "If Iraq's Saddam Hussein decide[s] to use terrorists to attack the continental United States [he] would likely turn to bin Laden's al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is among the Islamic groups recruiting increasingly skilled professionals," including "Iraqi chemical weapons experts and others capable of helping to develop WMD. Al Qaeda poses the most serious terrorist threat to U.S. security interests, for al Qaeda's well-trained terrorists are engaged in a terrorist jihad against U.S. interests worldwide."

And you forgot this didn't you?:

NPR reporter Mike Shuster interviewed Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, and offered this report:

Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. . . . Some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA Director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee when he said bin Laden was planning additional attacks on American targets.

By mid-February 1999, journalists did not even feel the need to qualify these claims of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. An Associated Press dispatch that ran in the Washington Post ended this way: "The Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against Western powers."

Somehow an alternative reality existed for the press when Clinton winked at it. Nuff said for now -- go RTWT...

WHOOPS part 349.

Running On Empty?

Not quite out of gas YET. Sorry. Not to say that a growing dependence on Canadians isn't tremendously worrying. Shipping more of those American jobs offshore you know. Well, OK, over the border at least...

The SPIN tries to mask the REALITY.

Did you know that "fascifist prudence" is a Googlewhack? Cool.

Totten summarizes sarin-dipity. And Lileks puts a sharp point on the dips.

WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOPS!

Hersh And His Story Are One?

This is just fascinating about Hersh and his Abu Ghraib story:

Hersh, of course, would tell you that the world needs to know the information his methods obtain. He may be right. But that is also what U.S. Military Intelligence believed about getting information by hook or crook out of the criminals and terrorists confined at Abu Ghraib that could save American lives.

My take is that we need to figure out how to be ruthless to actually win this thing -- and this story proves we're incapable of it. Let's be honest with ourselves here: if men wearing women's underwear is a war crime then why hasn't San Francisco been tried in an International War Crimes Tribunal?

And if we start making them wear ham suits will FranceArabia finally lose it and attempt to nuke us?

Not in my city. And then why do you hate the Americans you son of a b***h!?

Would Nick Berg Have Selected The Underwear Option?

The corrupt western media has worked day and night to make sure you don't think about this.

CBS takes on the people and their Google. Skip to the end if you must but Glenn is unmatched pulling this kind of stuff together!

Drip.

Drip. DRIP.

Important new information has come from Edward Jay Epstein about Mohammed Atta’s contacts with Iraqi intelligence. The Czechs have long maintained that Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers in the United States, met with Ahmed al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence official, posted to the Iraqi embassy in Prague. As Epstein now reports, Czech authorities have discovered that al-Ani’s appointment calendar shows a scheduled meeting on April 8, 2001 with a "Hamburg student."

That is exactly what the Czechs had been saying since shortly after 9/11: Atta, a long-time student at Germany’s Hamburg-Harburg Technical University, met with al-Ani on April 8, 2001. Indeed, when Atta earlier applied for a visa to visit the Czech Republic, he identified himself as a “Hamburg student.” The discovery of the notation in al-Ani’s appointment calendar about a meeting with a “Hamburg student” provides critical corroboration of the Czech claim.

Epstein also explains how Atta could have traveled to Prague at that time without the Czechs having a record of such a trip. Spanish intelligence has found evidence that two Algerians provided Atta a false passport.

Japanese tourists are welcome in Asia everywhere today...

It starts this way:

It wasn't till I got to the center of Jolo town in the late 1980s, some days after the fight between Mayor Saud Tan and Vice Governor Kimar Tulawie of Sulu that I became aware of the scale of the damage. There was a burned out area measuring about 1,000 x 1,500 meters that had been reduced to a flat stretch of blackened timber, twisted galvanized iron sheeting and pools of water. The hospital where I stood was on a hill, and therefore seized by Tulawie's men first. They had set up a mortar in the courtyard and machineguns in the windows where they could overlook the mayor's house 800 meters downrange. The doctors related, with a finely honed appreciation for the absurd, how the panicked patients had jumped out of the windows some still clutching bottles of dextrose hooked up to their veins, and scampered for their lives, the halt overtaking the lame. Tulawie's men found the range by walking the shells up to the Mayor's house, which in Jolo is another name for a fortification, and in the process set fire to the shantytown whose ruins stretched out before me. Two or three dozen people died, more than half a square mile burned out, and it didn't even rate a newspaper story in the capital of Manila. It didn't matter: the dead were buried and the warlords reached a modus vivendi .

And you clearly have a tin ear for writing if you haven't already CLICKED THROUGH to RTWT...

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." Dwight D. Eisenhower

Shamelessly stolen from Donald.

"The Story" Must Go On

And it looks like it's coming true... Hmmm. The press dodged some real egg on the face on this one. Looks like we now know why Abu Ghraib won't go away any time soon -- it's desperately needed not to ruin "the story"...

I'm starting to wonder if they actually would have tried to literally "bury the news" of tens of thousands dead if the plot had been pulled off...

Maybe in 30 years the left will have a similar epiphany about Iraq.

No callouses -- but dripping with blood my dear Watson!

Clear thinking from Totten: The WoT isn't like WWII -- it's the reheating of WWII. Remember Amin? Coincidence? You'd be delusional to think so...

VDH on the stupid.

Incubating the death cult. MUST. READ. IMMEDIATELY. ... ADDED. TO. CLASSICS.

No ruins? And friends like these...

A word for nothing left to lose...

And finally the tangled (Chinese, Russian, Pakistani, Al Qaeda, etc) web department.

Dog droppings do define Paris after all!

Woodward lied? Or TeddyKerry?

Lee Harris dissects a critic. Surely persuasion is the solution to all ills, no? And it's so easy!

And Lee slam dunks the quote of the day: "I can give you an argument, but I cannot give you an understanding. -- Samuel Johnson"

Well now, this is certainly inconvenient.

Panic as policy?

Home Depot trumps national security. And frequent flyers deserve all the inconvenience we can dish so as to avoid any possible hurt feeeeelings. Or common sense.

The third contender?

And what day would be complete without an update on Amin's trail of carnage? UPDATE: Read. This. Also. What. The. Hell. Is. Wrong. With. The. British. Don't get me wrong -- I love them in so many ways. But the feckless wrong-headed anti-semitism of Herbert Samuel and his staff leading to the elevation of Amin will eventually be recognized by historians as one of the truly great mistakes. This is just absolutely devastating.

Unfortunately, the good old days of de-Nazification are seen through rose colored glasses regarding how systematic we and the allies were. The only ones who got the concept right were the Soviets -- but then gave us the great gift of East Germany due to their own ruinous ideology.

The assymetry increases. Heh.

Nothing!

The NYeT slips dangerously close to the rule-base versus goal-based precipice... Must. Read. Now.

Sure, that sounds reasonable.

Very interesting...

Eastbound.

Noam, we can hardly understand ya...

Unthinkable? Afraid not folks...

Unimpeachable solutions. Brought to you by the congress of esperanto dictators...

Foragainst. SUVs. 87 billion. Etc. Etc. Etc.

UPDATE: My rosy pink &*%...

There's no business like Mullah business.

On Iraq and South Africa. But that's just a warm-up to THIS.

UPDATE: And THIS has reminded me how hopelessly negligent I have been not to post "The Three Conjectures" to the Classics links. Done.

On answering Churchill's question.

UPDATE: You really need to read it. Here's an essential taste:

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?" It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them."

The fascists believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust race (or nation), would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.

The terror masters have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.

In the past few days there has been a great to-do about a possible Iranian role in Iraq, mediating between us and Moqtada al Sadr. In the end, it came to nothing. Iran's deputy foreign minister was either unwilling or unable to deliver Moqtada, blamed us for the "failure," and went back to Tehran. But the point of the exercise was not to solve a problem for us — on the contrary, the Iranians intend to create ever greater problems on the ground — but to deliver a message to the restive Iranian people: "The Americans are so weak and impotent that they have to turn to us for help. So just forget about any American help to get rid of us."

If we can't manage Iraq without the mullahs, we certainly can't be strong enough to help the Iranian people get rid of the mullahcracy and achieve freedom.

It would have been embarrassing enough if this were the first time the Iranians had played such a game. But this was a humiliating replay of the "We've got al Qaeda guys for you" joke that they played on us at least twice in the last year. Remember when Deputy Secretary of State Armitage announced that his Iranian buddies were going to deliver al Qaeda terrorists in a matter of weeks? That never happened either, and again, the main point of the game was to demonstrate that the Bush administration was perfectly willing to negotiate with the mullahs. And therefore the United States wasn't going to remove them.

There is an additional stratagem involved in these little games: The mullahs figure that, if they can keep us engaged in the games, we won't crack down on their nuclear program. And the more time they can gain, the greater their chances of building an effective supply of atomic bombs. It's working.

As I have long argued, they may be crazy, but they are anything but stupid.

Well, there may have been some food involved. It seems less and less certain though...

The latest from the congress of dictators...

UPDATE: In case you missed it, Jordainian Buddhists have come unhinged!

Phony War's End.

How inconvenient...

The truth about the truth?

On the usefullness of surrender.

UPDATE: And don't forget Afghanistan...

The gathering storm?

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Halliburton as kindergartners. While Hitchen rocks with perspective.

Where, oh, where could they possibly be hiding them?

Who says there's no room for innovation left in wireless networking -- and then some?

Just your average WHOOPS.

Hitchens Strikes Again

Hitchens has an update for us on dud theories...

To listen to Clarke now, you could almost imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan and eviction of the Taliban—the actual first response of the administration to Sept. 11—had not taken place. To listen to Clarke, also, you would suppose that any Iraqi connection to terrorism was sucked straight out of Rumsfeld's or Wolfowitz's thumb. One theory that does collapse completely is that of administration foreknowledge—the Bush people were evidently in no shape to take any quick advantage of the events and seemingly hadn't bothered to plant even one Iraqi among the mainly Saudi hijackers. But in my experience, dud theories die only to be replaced by new and even dumber ones. The current reigning favorite is that fighting al-Qaida in Iraq is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.

Ummm -- no.

Enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom.

The decline of the Kido Butai?

How can I resist? Must. Try. Breaking. Down.:

The French Government, taking a page from our own Department of Homeland Security has established internal threat levels. Unlike the USA, the French only have four such levels. They are, from low to high: RUN, HIDE, SURRENDER, and COLLABORATE.

On Saturday, in light of the Madrid bombing, France has raised its terror alert level from "RUN" to "HIDE."

WHOOPS!

UPDATE: Whoops II. Bigger than the first whoops as you can see ;)

On political Alzheimer's and WMD tales.

And progressives could care less...

Qaeda: Learning organization?Mandatory. Reading.

Rethinking the lessons of Lebanon.

To which retarded product shall we surrender Mr. Bean?

Of draining swamps and refilling marshes...

Mea stabus maximus.

Pretzel logic examined.

Pigs fly a little bit at least...

Of Course He Said Imminent -- Whoops!

Since Bush does such a bad job of defending himself, here once again is the relevant quote from the 2003 SOTU:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Orwell would be awe-struck at how effectively the left has used proof by repeated assertion to create a memory hole. Even more amusing, the White House site makes you work to find the speech text!

If they can't stab the guards, they will be humiliated. Of COURSE, murderers can be routinely rehabilitated -- what kind of a mental midget are you? /sarcasm

Darren says to read the writing on the wall and I couldn't agree more...

How inconvenient!

Don't say I didn't warn you more than once:

My daughter went to a lecture tonight at Lynchburg College on post-war Germany up to the present. The speaker, a German national, said that neo-Nazism and antisemitism are quite alive in her home town of Passau. People openly display the swastika, which was forbidden after WWII, and even use the heil salute.

More on Foreign Kerry Supporters -- We Swear By Allah It Is True!

This is just a beauty!:

AL QUDS (Reuters) - A spokesman for terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden said on Wednesday that Al Qaeda would immediately cease terrorist operations and disband if Americans elect John Kerry president this November.

"Hear us, o infidel," said Sheikh Sqari al-Paq al-Ipz. "The prospect of four or, Allah forbid, eight years of hair-splitting from this horse-faced douche strikes fear into our very hearts. How will we oppose Satan when we won't know what Satan stands for from one day to the next?"

He went on to say that if America elected a socialist candidate, not only would Al Qaeda disband, it would order each of its members to kill themselves. "We swear by Allah it is true," said al-Paq al-Ipz. "We'd really, really be upset if you voted socialist. Big time."

"We love death more than you love nuance," he added.

Hat tip LGF.

Certainly all the intellectual firepower of him anyway...

And reasonable prices too ... since human lives don't count...

More lawyers for the terrorists and more stretchers for their victims.