Glenn: I think that Allah captures both sides of this story best, with two passages. First: "Have we actually reached the point where Senate seats now turn on the sex scandals of fictional characters?"

But also: "If George Allen had written this book, not only would the left be going berserk, they’d be circulating lists of characters in his other books whom they suspect of being gay."

Yes, it's that bad.

"In politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations (PR) campaigns which seek to create the impression of being a spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the "AstroTurf" (artificial grass) is a metaphor to indicate "fake grassroots" support. [ Duped again... -ed. ] "

"These three incidents, coming over a space of a few days, have torn wide open a fissure which became visible for the first time, when Member of Parliament Jack Straw, until last month a stout devotee of multiculturalism suddenly wrote an article in his local paper. Jaws dropped all over Britain when Straw wrote his defense of the reasons he has begun asking Pakistani women constituents who visit his office to discuss problems to remove their veils. His point, of course, is that it is difficult to talk to someone whose facial expressions one cannot judge. Tony Blair has also now admitted that the veil makes him uneasy. With the bandwagon gathering pace, London mayor and keen adherent of multiculturalism "Red" Ken Livingstone, knocked the population of London over with a feather when he said on BBC's Radio 4 that he would like to see Muslims giving up the veil, although he didn't think this should be imposed "from the outside".

Wearing the veil accords the wearer what British columnist Melanie Phillips refers to as a "radical imbalance of power" in that it gives the veil-wearer the advantage of reading the facial expressions of others, while keeping her own reactions hidden. It is beginning to be viewed in Britain not as a symbol of female subjugation, but as a weapon of aggression and radical Islam. The British-born mothers of these young Pakistani-heritage veil-wearing women did not wear the veil. [ The veil is BOTH a symbol of female subjugation AND a weapon of aggression. Never mind that recent abductees in the Gaza report being shuttled around concealed under hijab. What a surprise. It's a religious "obligation" that's only obligatory for their enemies to treat as one -- not for the "believers". That's the beauty of it for the Islamofascists of course... -ed. ] "

"If only."

"It so happens that everything that is stupid is not unconstitutional."

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- C.S. Lewis"

Qutb and Greeley Again

Wretchard swings for the rafters and connects:

"After Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by Harry Truman's America [ That would be the church ladies just down the road from here in Greeley, CO; my aunt Audora missed being one of them by about 60 miles in actuality but of course she was one in spirit. It's a good thing that he never heard Mom, Audora and Luther sing on the radio or we'd all be dead already... -ed. ] he was later brutalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser's prisons. It may have been the low cut dresses of American women that first planted the seed which was to grow into al-Qaeda's ideology but it was the blood shed by Marxist torturers that watered it. Qutb and later Osama bin Laden saw Marxism and secularism as agencies of the Devil; but to destroy them it was first necessary to destroy the world's system administrator: the USA. One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are its most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda's pet hates that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats. But the second greatest irony that the surviving non-Muslim believers in Europe — the Christians, Buddhists and Jews — have not only had to bear the intellectual brunt of defending liberalism up to now, but are now being asked to give up the public profession of their own faith in order to preserve it."

And there you have it.

"If the West hopes to live it must find a shelter within its own heart from which to resist an Islamism that has outlasted the centuries. “The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said French police spokesman Bruno Beschizza. For that reason the thing that must change for everyone in the face of this challenge is that they be determined to survive. Only then can job programs, education or police crackdowns have any effect. Or maybe they will never have any effect; but simply give us something to do until the plague goes away."

"However, Dr Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, said "This is a good quality study but I don’t think it tackles the issue.

"If you’re using your phone for four hours a day, presumably it is out of your pocket for longer. That raises a big question: how is it that testicular damage is supposed to occur?"

He said mobile phone use may be a marker for other lifestyle factors known to affect sperm quality.

"Maybe people who use a phone for four hours a day spend more time sitting in cars, which could mean there’s a heat issue. It could be they are more stressed, or more sedentary and sit about eating junk food getting fat. Those seem to be better explanations than a phone causing the damage at such a great distance" he added."

"Here is the uncomfortable truth facing Islam’s Western apologists: Politically correct concessions to the Islamic community, instead of encouraging moderates, have only empowered the extremists."

"This is the way our secretary of state chooses to characterize the nation that has been our steadfast friend for 60 years (brutal occupying power), to demonstrate her devotion for a people who celebrated the slaughter of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 by dancing in the streets of Ramallah."

"The left constantly repeats the slogan that "the Bush tax cuts benefited the rich" when in actuality the Bush tax cuts have soaked the rich. Revenues to the Treasury have increased every year since the tax cuts went into effect in 2003 and have reduced the deficit- the exact opposite of what liberal politicians originally predicted."

"What would Ernie Pyle or any other great war correspondent of the past think of CNN’s decision to air video showing snipers targeting U.S. troops in Iraq?"

"Panic will peak between now and November 7, and then subside when it no longer serves an immediate political interest. Remember al Qaqa? In the meantime, it's no surprise if the Iraqis have come to doubt the reliability of their chief allies."

"The owl acknowledges unreservedly Europe's aging populations, its decreasing population growth and its need for migrants — but also sees that selection of migrants is not always based on who is useful for the economy.

The owl sees that Islam is not Christianity and that not all Muslims understand or want to share in any European future based on European values of freedom, tolerance and an attitude of live and let live.

The owl sadly looks on as poor kids are taught to view themselves as victims, and the society in which they live as the enemy. He can't help but notice that Muslim migrants are receptive to the seduction of the Islamist movement. Even worse, there are now natives converting to this brand of totalitarianism.

Nor can the owl ignore the growth of the extreme right-wing movements and parties. He fears that the debate on pluralism in Europe will be hijacked by two uncompromising extremes: whites' power fascism and Islamic fascism.

The owl thinks that the ostrich is right: We should always look on the bright side of life. But he also thinks we should be careful not to get delusional."

"Everywhere else, for the most part, they've taken the advice of Myers and that think tank in Vermont. In America, there are 2.1 live births per woman. In 17 European countries, it's 1.3 or below -- that's what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, a rate from which no society has ever recovered. Spain's population is halving with every generation. These nations are doing what Myers and the Vermont "sustainability" junkies would regard as the socially responsible thing, and having fewer babies. And as a result their countries are dying demographically and (more immediately) economically: They don't have enough young people to pay for the generous social programs the ever more geriatric Europeans have come to expect."

"Surveillance of communications is often used as a means of gathering. How this is done is not talked about often. This is because the information that is acquired is often very good. Surveillance of enemy communications was one of the biggest factors in the American victory at Midway in 1942, and many other operations since. In 1943 Ten months later, a similar surveillance led to the mission in which Tom Lanphier shot down the plane carrying Isoroku Yamamoto. Communications intelligence also played a major part in defeating the U-boats in the Atlantic as well.

A lot of the methods used to gather intelligence in World War II (particularly codebreaking) were kept classified for decades after the Japanese surrender ended the war in 1945. Similarly, the Venona project stayed secret in the 1950s, even when information from that project could have defused controversies over the prosecution of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss.

In the war on terror, this is equally important. Not just for breaking up attacks, but also for mapping out the networks through a process known as traffic analysis. This can be done with just phone records (the leak of the NSA's request to various phone companies managed to tell terrorist which companies cooperated, and who company didn't). This is vital in terms of building an organizational chart of any enemy capabilities, but only if the enemy doesn't think that others are listening."

""This is an especially telling admission from the Times 'ombudsman,' who, in theory at least, is supposed to be the most objective journalist in the Times organization. But a 'vicious criticism' (what? did GWB forget to call you the world's greatest newspaper?) is enough to warp your objectivity enough to print a story that did major damage to the safety and security of the United States?""

"New York Times ombudsman Barney Calame, often referred to as “The Empty Suit,” finally gets around to admitting that the Times was wrong to reveal the SWIFT program that monitored terrorist banking.

He also admits that no person’s private data was misused, and that the program was not illegal. [ He's always been Bendict Lichtblau to me... -ed. ] "

""You do sometimes wonder what goes on in their little minds, don't you?" said Private Al Hartley. "You'll just see, like, one bloke pop up and start shooting at you, and you'll go like that. Ph!" He shrugged. "There's, like, 30 of us and he's standing in the middle of a field, not trying to get into cover, just actually shooting at us, because, in his mind, all he wants to do is kill English soldiers.""

"The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths Islamic terrorists who are bent on more than vandalism.

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”"

"Call me crazy, but is someone who was impeached and removed for bribery a good choice for leadership on the Intelligence Committee? And is somebody who thinks so a good choice to head the House Democrats?"

"Nay, it is a proxy war between the US and Iran. It is being fought on multiple fronts. Iraq is another. We are going to have to blow Iran up and soon. [ The carrier groups are getting congested in the Persian Gulf as we ponder... -ed. ] "

"So on one side of broad pathway through of history we have the nightmares of the left, while on the other side we have the naughty Moors of the right, i.e., the Islamists who believe that time is a big mistake and that we need to undo it and return to the Golden Age of 1267. But that too is a caliphate worse than death, because you cannot undo time without destroying a lot of genies and the bottles they came in. Tenured clowns to the left of me, armed and dangerous jokers to the right, stuck in the middle are the Jews.

Yes, the Jews, because the Jewish prophets discovered history as we know it, which is to say linear history, which is to say irreversible time, which is to say evolution, which is to say the anti-entropic nature of the whole existentialada as the river of time flows toward its nonlocal deustinocean. And yet, at the same time, no human group has been more diligent about preserving and recollecting the primordial tradition that connects us to our source and makes us human, i.e., revelation. Perhaps a rabbi will correct me, but I believe it would not be treffling with scripture to say that, on a spiritual level, Torah is analogous to DNA, in that it represents not just our human blueprint, but the blueprint of creation itself."

"It has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. --Matthew 13:11-13"

POST_HTML:
"It is vain to say: "Well, if they come here, they must conform with British society and its easy ways." Muslims will not do that. Their religion forbids it.

Why do we suppose India had to be partitioned?"

"They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.

Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.

Now I don't know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the "mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm" (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn't that be a good way to do it?

But reality couldn't stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded."

"With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census.

Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census.

And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it--try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions. [ This is what happens when ideology is more important than smarts in academic selection criteria. D'oh. -ed. ] "

What's worse than Tet? Something almost inconsequential compared to Tet is made by the Enemedia to seem worse than Tet -- that's what:

"The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no way resembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the North Vietnamese People's Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns in South Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost 45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any place or any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for the Vietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up their long-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government and the American army.

Indeed, insofar as Tet was a defeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government, it was because the American media decided to represent it as such. It has become a cliché to say that Vietnam was a media war, but so it was. Much of the world media were hostile to American involvement from the start, particularly in France, which had fought and lost its own Vietnam war in 1946-54. The defeat of Dien Bien Phu rankled with the French and there were few who wanted to see the Americans win where they had failed. [ Once more my level of shock could seem to rise no higher... -ed. ]

It was, however, the American rather than the foreign media who decided on the verdict. The American media had begun by supporting the war. As it dragged on, however, without any end in sight and with the promised military victory constantly postponed, American newspapers and — critically — the evening television programmes began to treat war news as a bad story."

"So is the left side of aisle more concerned with image than with substance, that is with the opinion of others rather than the interior compass of the self? It seems to me to be so. I am not saying that, politically speaking, the right side of the aisle evinces no such conerns - pundits love to wax eloquent about how all politicians need to make sure they are attractive to the base of their party. But it does seem to me that the left side overall acts more within honor/shame frameworks than the right side. If so, it also helps explain why the left side is pretty fast to sympathize with the aggrieved feelings of Muslims generally when it comes to US policy: accusations are more important than evidence."

"JERUSALEM (AFP) - Hezbollah fired cluster munitions into northern Israel during this summer’s 34-day war with the Jewish state, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report. [ Well those and the unguided rockets filled with pointy scrap metal... -ed. ] "

"Now, if you adopt a strictly Darwinian, materialistic view, then the answer to this question is obvious: a healthy person is simply one who survives, because that is the whole point of natural selection. Thus, Stalin was more healthy than the 20 to 40 million people he murdered, just as Hitler was clearly more healthy than the 6 million Jews he slaughtered. Survival of the fittest is the final arbiter in nature. You may think that I am being a bit polemical, but this was the philosophy of one of the forerunners of postmodernity, Nietzsche, who believed that the whole idea of “God” was a pathological meme that simply protected the weak and infirm from the harsh judgment of nature."

"Our enemies in the Muslim world are our enemies precisely because they are sick men from sick societies who wish to spread their disease to the rest of the world. But in our own world, approximately half of the population suffers from a soul pathology that prevents them from making judgments on, or even perceiving, the soul pathology of our external enemies. Thus, there are no feminist groups who have rallied behind George Bush, who has liberated more Muslim women than perhaps any other human being in history. Likewise, I know of no leftists who celebrate the achievements of the great liberator Ronald Reagan, who gave millions of victims of a satanic ideology the opportunity to become human again. For if leftists were to acknowledge these achievements, they would no longer be leftists. They would be cured."

"Someone one wrote that "pacifism is the process of extending war to its greatest possible duration". That's unfair to pacifists. It's the process of of extending the war to its greatest possible duration in the hope that it will become more humane."

"Abdul Rahman, you may recall, converted from Islam to Christianity and was spirited to Italy when Afghanistan's brave new democratic government determined to obey Muhammad's command to kill those who leave Islam (cf. Bukhari 4.52.260). Now jihadists in Afghanistan are demanding his return in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist.

And meanwhile, Islamic apologists in the U.S. blandly claim that Islam has no death penalty for apostasy, and call me "Islamophobic" for pointing out that it actually does (Salam Al-Maryati of MPAC did this to me on the Medved show not long ago, and it has happened elsewhere also). This illustrates the hollowness of the arguments we hear all the time about how we must support self-proclaimed moderate Muslims by refraining from noting the flimsiness and weakness of their presentations. While we're being polite to alleged "reformers," Muslim hardliners are cheerfully implementing the elements of Islamic law that we're nodding our heads and agreeing don't exist."

"“One CIA pilot told me that in the mid 1990s, when Clinton was president, that the lawyers began to take over. Previously, they used to take CIA planes into hangars all the time, re-spray them, and come out with a different tail number. That way none of the tracing of CIA planes I’ve been doing since 9/11 would have been possible. The idea of flying around with one tail number for three years would have been thought completely nuts,” Grey told me. “But [Clinton-era] lawyers said they needed to stay legal. They even insisted that, to comply with FAA regulations, they needed stewardesses.”

Yes, stewardesses on CIA planes."

"Not surprisingly to me but shocking to many, the President obviously knows more history than his interviewer. When President Bush "accepts" the analogy of the surge in violence in Iraq to the Tet offensive in Vietnam, he is not "accepting" that Iraq is an unwinnable struggle against a noble enemy. He is saying that victory or defeat in Iraq will not be a function of the amount of violence that the enemy is able to do during any given period, but our will to keep fighting notwithstanding that violence. In that one regard, Iraq is dangerously similar to Vietnam, which fact the mainstream media would know if the typical editor read military history instead of the journalism puerile fascifist inanity pretending to be history that fills the bestseller lists. [ Sometimes, even Tigerhawk needs to be corrected ;) -ed. ] "

"Statesmen. Bi-partisan. National interest. All words and phrases which, if the trend continues, will eventually end up as obsolete terms. And when they do, "American" may not be far behind.

Makes you want to shout, "keep up the good work", doesn't it?"

"Nothing makes me more certain of the victory of our ideas than our success in the universities. --Adolf Hitler [ Fascism ... the same as it ever was... -ed. ] "

"Stein goes on to soften his critique by informing us that Hulon stays “up nights worrying about Al Qaeda.” Personally, I’d prefer he stayed up nights doing a little reading so he wouldn’t be operating under such a cloak of ignorance.

GEORGE W. BUSH, DONALD RUMSFELD AND DICK CHENEY are routinely excoriated for not taking every pronouncement from our intelligence community as if it were wisdom handed down directly from Mt. Sinai. I go in the other direction – if the people making the decisions of life and death actually care what these clueless intelligence analysts are saying, shame on them.

One of the many turf-wars Donald Rumsfeld has fought during the last six years has been over his desire to create a new intelligence service that would work under him at the Department of Defense. Is there any wonder why he would feel the old services are broken beyond repair?"

"(Name the true man who said it: “God has created [the United States] and brought us to our present position of power and strength” in order to defend “spiritual values--the moral code--against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them.” Answer* at bottom.) ... ... ... ... --Harry Truman"

"People like Reid, Hastert, Pelosi are complete mediocrities who should be at much lower levels in our society. Something is fundamentally wrong on both sides of the aisle if they are the upper leadership of our Congress."

UPDATE: And check out the ending of this comment: "So, more and more people, generations now, grow up in symbol manipulating and think reality is an inconvenience, at best. They live in a dream. They think their lives are fake and TV is real. And they have no clue how everything was made and how we got here, and how it can slip away, fall apart, be gone by inattentive erosion or in a flash. And, for all of my life, the left has ripped at every single, boring institution, and the hum drum work a day values that built it all." Wow. Looks like he just read David Warren not far below...

"What time is it in Russia? Twilight, Yakovlev’s memoir seems to tell us."

"As I’ve written before, Iran and North Korea, which are active partners in the development of nuclear weapons and missiles, take turns in creating crises that put the U.S. and allies in a game resembling “monkey in the middle”. Just as the heat is rising against the one, the other will perform an outrageous, attention-getting stunt. But China quietly and happily benefits from their cooperative effort to keep Western eyes off the Chinese ball.

This picture I am giving of world affairs may seem over-simple, and pessimistic. I wish it were. Postmodern man -- who votes, and swings the opinion polls, in the constitutional democracies -- is remarkably unable to cope with the reality of evil in the world around him. He has an attention span too short to assimilate even a sustained challenge from a single source, let alone multiple challenges. He knows little history, and what he does know tends to be seriously wrong. More deeply, he lacks tradition -- the kind of wisdom that could operate on his instincts, even when his rational mind were neither well-trained nor well-informed. Yet he is also poorly informed about current events, and his native ability to reason is vitiated by cheap and disintegrative “relativist” ideas. He is personally a coward, and a voluptuary: he lives for the day, and for pleasure, even in the absence of satisfaction or joy. His role models in popular culture are all narcissists. He is the pure consumer of morally poisonous entertainment. He lives selfishly; yet in his own loveless, self-regarding world, he avoids thinking of his own death."

"A JoongAng newspaper poll, several days after the reported nuclear test Monday, found 78 percent of respondents thought South Korea should revise its policy, and 65 percent said South Korea should develop nuclear weapons to protect itself.

Protesters have held nightly candlelight vigils, and some have burned North Korean flags."

"Secretary Rice describes herself as a student of history, though she herself seems to be dreaming here. She is dreaming, perhaps, of Yasser Arafat's January 2002 remarks in which Arafat likened himself to George Washington. When she wakes up, I wonder if she'll identify a few active Palestinian political figures who dream of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace with Israel rather than dream of a Palestinian state in its place. Dreamers of the latter dream seem to constitute a conspicuous majority of the followers of Hamas and Arafat's Fatah Party. In any event, perhaps Secretary Rice can contemplate how the latter dream is also one of those that may seem impossible before it happens and inevitable afterward."

"This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis . . . . But if you think that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb."

"Nonproliferation efforts don't seem to be working very well. [ The perfect understatement. -ed. ] "

"Finally, note the silence from the numerous critics of the “Path to 9/11” who objected to the film’s adaptation of the 9/11 report. But that docu-drama clearly identified itself as a fictionalized rendition of a document, and made no claims as history. In contrast, this new genre of journalistic exposé purports to give us the real story of Iraq, but denies us the very tools of determining whether what we are reading is true, half-true, or simply made up."

"And even if Bush were to hold direct talks—so reminiscent of World War II appeasers’ sigh that a chance to have talked to Hitler could have been prevented the war—the contrarians like Sens. Kerry, Biden, Kennedy, Boxer, Durbin et al. would then be screaming about the need for “multilateral” six-party talks with China and other regional partners. How odd this political season that all the failures of the past—Cyrus Vance, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Warren Christopher, and Madeline Albright who variously presided over the Iranian hostage mess, the failed Oslo accords, and the al Qaeda serial provocations of the 1990s that led to 9/11—are now evoked as sober and judicious exemplars."

"The Palestinians can't blame Israel for this. Shootings such as the one that took Rafiq Siam have their origins in a divide that war alone can address now. In the end, neither side can win, because both are essentially nihilistic and will not stop. The Palestinians have created a death cult in two different flavors, and both sides value martyrdom so much that both will fight until everyone is dead in order to keep power in their own hands, once the fighting starts."

"Given the ease with which the North Korean leaders suckered ambassador Jimmy Carter, and the Clinton administration, in 1994, they know big threats can earn them big rewards. And with the Democrats poised to make large advances in the mid-term U.S. Congressional elections, they may be negotiating with idiots again, soon.

From John Bolton’s remarks at the U.N., and several statements in Washington, we can see that the Bush administration, at least, has seen through this rather pathetic ruse. What we need, instead of a fresh aid package, is to cut off the regime from all Western contact and help, including all the pointless diplomatic chatter that encourages more stunts, and all the humanitarian aid that seldom gets through to its intended recipients anyway. Step up anti-missile defences, and as I’ve argued for years, invite Japan, South Korea, and all other regional allies to join NATO. This, moreover, is a precaution against the aggressive intentions of China -- the smooth fist behind North Korea’s spiky glove."

Iraqi Kite-Flying Innumeracy

Omar gets some serious backup in the comments:

"A real response? I see, a man who actually lives in Iraq can not be trusted but this nonsensical report can.

According to this report about 770 people have died every day. Every day. Where are they? They do not say. According to this report 14% of the 655,000 people died as a result of suicide bombers, that would be about 91,700 people. When and where were these people killed? They don't have a clue.

A bad month in Iraq is about 2600 casualties, but according to this socalled survey, 22,800 people have died every single month.

A third, or more than 200,000 would have died in air raids. That is more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

According to this report 57% were killed by gunfire, that would be about 373,000 people.

Where are the bodies? When and where they buried? Did the BBC and AP, UPI, Reuters, AlJazeera all conspire to help hide the truth? Are the US and the Iraqi government together with all the doctors and mayors part of the plot ot hide these hundreds of thousands of dead people?

They took the deaths of a few hundred people and exptrapolated them into more than 600,000 and they compared numbers to the preinvasion Iraq saying there had been virtually no violent deaths in Iraq the 14 months before the invasion. Think about how absurd that is.

Oh yes, Iraq was just a paradise of kite flying children."

Halabja? What Halabja? Mass graves? What mass graves?

"I wonder if anyone has mentioned to Mr. Peanut that the agreement of which he was so proud went almost immediately into the NoKo shredder."

"What a pity! We first failed to see that we would inevitably have to fight a regional war if we were to win in Iraq. Then, insisting on our myopia, we designed tactics to play defense in Iraq alone. And now we seem to have turned to the diplomats to “solve” the problem. They can’t do it. They can only guarantee the war will expand, the Iranians will become stronger and more aggressive, and many more people will die even as the diplomats celebrate their own surrender.

On the other hand, the template of American foreign policy seems to dictate that we be saved by our enemies, and rarely through our own brilliance. It may seem paradoxical that our best hope lies with the fanatics in Tehran, but there you have it."

"Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools. -- Albert Einstein"

"But if Putnam is correct, then one of the central tenets of multiculturalism — that it brings people together if they simply "respect" each others differences — immediately requires qualification. In fact, it becomes entirely conceivable that the multiculti program is actually the driver behind many of the tensions which are now rising in places like France, the Netherlands and the UK."

"One may think that this is an arcane philosophical point, but many civilizations have been shipwrecked on its rocks. The Muslim world, for example, decided long ago that science was unnecessary, because if it discovered something that contradicted the Koran, then it was false, whereas if it discovered something that confirmed the Koran, it was unnecessary. With this tautology, Muslims said ta-ta ta' modernity.

In fact, I believe this epistemological problem is at the heart of the three-headed civilizational battle we are currently waging between leftism, Islamism, and classical American liberalism. The problem of Islam speaks for itself. But the same problem applies to the left, for it too attempts to seal the book of knowledge and prevent thought from straying into forbidden areas. Just as it believes in a topdown command economy, it believes in a “command intelligentsia” that enforces a particular view of reality from on high. Its means is the takeover of the elite media and of academia from preschool through graduate school, and its method is political correctness. And the higher you move up through the system, the greater the pressure to conform to a certain tacit worldview."

Let's do the math, shall we?:

"Some experts go further, suggesting that Japan may have a design on the shelf.

"I'd be surprised if they didn't," said Frank Barnaby, a British nuclear physicist and nonproliferation advocate who's studied Japan's nuclear energy industry. "They have stocks of plutonium. They have the know-how. All that is lacking is the political decision."

Japan is third, after the United States and France, in nuclear power output. Its 54 reactors produce as much as 35 percent of the electricity consumed here, and its 43 tons in plutonium stockpiles are among the largest in the world. A nuclear bomb can be built with 17 or 18 pounds of plutonium."

[ 43 tons X 2000lbs/ton / 18lbs/bomb = 4778. But I'm sure you figured that out already. -ed. ]

Michelle remembers how we got here:

You might wonder why Anna Politkovskaya was killed by the Kremlin:

"Today's regime in Russia, as personified first and foremost by Putin, is interested only in power — to keep it, consolidate and augment it, and do it in such a way that opponents would not even be able to raise their heads[.]"

Any questions?

"The North has said it would boycott the nuclear talks until the U.S. lifts financial restrictions imposed for its alleged counterfeiting and money laundering. [ Alleged? AP = All Propaganda. All the time... -ed. ] "

"On January 20, 1981, Reagan was sworn into office and within minutes all of the hostages were released.

After so many months and so much groveling, what led to the Iranians’ sudden reversal? In the answer to that question lies a significant moral. Bowden ends his book without explicitly spelling out what the moral is, but his entire narrative is one long case study in the perils of appeasing violent fanatics. For our current efforts to effectuate another and even greater reversal in Iran, few things are more vital than learning what his book has to teach."

"KATE WRITES: "By the time you read this, seven more women will most likely have been stoned to death after being convicted of committing adultery.""

"As I said at the debate I was in last night: who does the average American fear more—the FBI or the IRS? The local zoning board, or the NSA? What does he fear more: the ten commandments on the wall of his child's school, or having the new addition to the house disallowed by the zoning board, the EPA, or the Americans with Disabilities act? On what does he spend more time: preparing his taxes, earning the money to pay for them, and arguing with the various tax authorities about what he owes . . . or checking for roving wiretaps?

Let's face it: one of the biggest problems civil libertarians are battling in the war against warrantless wiretaps, and so forth, is that 99% of the citizenry (correctly) believes that the government is not planning to use such measures against them. I'm on the side of the civil libertarians, mind you, but I recognize that this is why all the cries about America descending into a dark night of fascism, and Bush being the worst president ever on civil liberties (which even a light perusal of history reveals as silly), are falling on deaf ears."

Gagdad rocks out on Polanyi. RTWT without delay:

"Although the postmodernists have done their best to undermine the principles underlying western civilization, nevertheless, the memory of Christianity remains, since it is in our very blood and bones. This memory produces a “passionate urge to pursue righteousness,” even though the assumptions of postmodernism deny the very reality of objective moral truth. Once traditional morality has been shattered, in the words of Polanyi,

“moral passions are diverted into the only channels which a strictly mechanistic conception of man and society left open to them. We may describe this as a process of moral inversion. The morally inverted person has not merely performed a philosophical substitution of material purposes for moral aims; he is acting with the whole of his homeless moral passions within a purely materialistic framework of purposes.”

Thus, at the foundation of postmodern moral inversion is always the same thing: “the combination of skeptical rationalism and moral perfectionism, which is nothing more than the 'secularized fervor of Christianity.’” But whereas “moral perfectionism within a Christian context is moderated by the doctrine of original sin and deferral of perfection to the end of history, the perfectionism of a post-Christian world provides no such moderating counterbalances.”"

It's very short. But one of the best concise introductions to the origins of Islamo-fascism. Two printed pages that you need to read over and over until it sinks in:

"Fascism emerged in the early 20th century in Italy, Spain and Germany. The slogan "Long live death!" was made notorious by Spanish fascists. In a famous confrontation in 1936, the great Spanish philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno responded in Salamanca to a speech by fascist General Millan-Astray in which the general had repeated the slogan "Viva Muerte!" ("Long Live Death!") with a speech of his own, declaring "There is a time when to be silent is to lie." He then denounced General Millan-Astray and the Spanish fascists for their assault on Spanish civilization and culture. (The next day, Unamuno, in his 80's, was arrested and he died soon thereafter.) After France fell in 1940 and its fascist Vichy puppet regime was created, French colonial territories throughout the world were left to choose their own sides. In the Middle East, the French territories chose Vichy. It should be no surprise to hear from the leader of Hamas in Lebanon today that the difference between his group and the Israelis is that whereas the Israelis cherish life, his group celebrates death (including the suicide bombers). As the great Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis points out recently in his essay "Freedom and Justice in Islam," Nazi organizers came from Germany in the early 1940's to restructure social regimes in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, promoting a permanent vicious hatred against the Jews, and forming Ba'athist (fascist) parties throughout the region. (I would add that the grand mufti of Jerusalem, the Muslim leader in British-mandated Palestine, and who later provoked the 1948 war there, was also a Nazi sympathizer who went to visit Hitler in Germany in 1941 and returned to inflame existing local conflicts into deep hatred against Jewish settlers.) Islamo-fascism IS literally Islamo-fascism.

When American apologists for terrorists, and others who feed on their own political correctness or other grievances, recently criticized the use of the phrase "Islamo-fascism," they attempted, consciously or unconsciously, to avert the world's attention from actual and historical origins of the hatreds in the Middle East, and the womb of the ideology of much of the terrorism from which has grown a supranational threat and a gathering world storm.

Recent gloating by these apologists that they had successfully suppressed the term "Islamo-fascism" by associating it with their negative perceptions of President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and the efforts to prepare for and combat the gathering storm, was premature. The term is exactly and historically accurate. It will not go away. Nor will the storm."

And after you get it, go order yourself a DVD of "Obsession". And watch that over and over until you get it.

"But it's not enough. There are liberal causes that have nothing to do with opposing Bush and his Republican henchmen. In fact, some of those causes might even place liberals and Republican henchmen on the same side. And liberals must be passionate about them nonetheless. Partisan militancy may be necessary to combat Republican power. But it cannot define what it means to be a liberal in the United States today.

Except that it pretty much does."

"A Muslim minicab driver refused to take a blind passenger because her guide dog was “unclean”.

Abdul Rasheed Majekodumni told Jane Vernon she could not get into his car with the dog because of his religion. Islamic tradition warns Muslims against contact with dogs because they are seen as impure. [ Civil rights for blind people? Why would that matter? -ed. ]

The case emerged as Jack Straw was embroiled in a controversy over Muslim women wearing veils and the row continued after a Muslim police officer was excused guard duty at the Israeli embassy. [ And why should us Western Kuffar not be forced to talk with a straight face to black sacks as if they're not being abused. "Elephant in the room" indeed. -ed. ] "

"Let's see, GDP growth is strong, productivity is way up, unemployment is low, family incomes are rising, inflation is down, the stock market is up, and the federal deficit is down. Yet polls show that we are about to put more Democrats into both the House and the Senate.

So much for "it's the economy, stupid!" Wixted has lots of interesting charts and data."

QandO brings us an analysis of today's blinding glint off the giant sheet of tinfoil in Asia:

"Hilarious if it wasn't so serious. "Farewell to the nuclear non-proliferation regime", but NoKo promises to "faithfully implement its international commitment in the field of nuclear non-proliferation as a responsible nuclear-weapons state and to prohibit nuclear transfer."

You simply can't get anymore schizo than that.

This is a definite "ratcheting up" of the rhetoric coming out of North Korea. But it seems clear that, like many puffed up little potentates, Kim Jong-il has no idea what he's really messing with. It is worrisome that he sees his nuclear weapons as tools to force his will in the region. It is also worrisome that he thinks his use of his tools is survivable. It is that sort of irrational thinking which increases the chance of a nuclear exchange.

For all our concern about Iran and the 12th Imam, this screed (if it is indeed the voice of Kim Jong-il as implied) is just as irrational.

There have been reports that Kim Jong-il is suffering bad health. You have to begin to wonder, if true, whether he is thinking he has to act on his fantasy of Korean unification before he loses the ability to do so. No matter how odd some of the reasoning in this article may seem to most, it is something to be taken very seriously. It may indeed seem like the ravings of a isolated and slightly mad man who really doesn't have a firm grasp on reality (or what he could potentially unleash). But that doesn't mean he won't act on it if, for whatever reason, he concludes he must.

Does that mean he actually can attack the US? That's not really clear. That doesn't mean, however, that he won't try or won't end up attacking something. North Korea is a very serious diplomatic situation. And like Iran, there just aren't very many good options. [ It's possible that the underground test will fail just like the recent insane missile tests. It's only a matter of time until one succeeds, however... -ed. ] "

"It has come to my attention that Jihadis organized a campaign against us to have our videos removed by You Tube. Some people’s accounts have even been terminated. I don’t know exactly how the You Tube suspension system works, but it looks like a video will be removed if it gets a certain number of complaints (which may be accepted without investigation), and an account gets closed when the third video is removed. One of my videos was recently removed for “inappropriate content.” The video, ‘It’s In The Koran’ could be viewed at http://www.terrorfreeoil.org/videos/ItsInTheKoran.php, second screen (alternative video source). This video contains no sexually explicit content and could only be offensive to Muslims who reject any notion of criticism. At the same time, many al-Qaeda propaganda videos, Nazi videos, etc. are posted on You Tube."

"When asked, Kurds attribute their peaceful neighborhood to the fact that Kurds are not Arabs. But this is not the main reason, for the Kurds have, in the past, been as factious and violent as the Iraqi Arabs are now. But during the 1990s, when the U.S. and Britain agreed to keep Saddam's forces out of the north (to prevent another large scale massacre of Kurds), the Kurds sorted out their differences and learned the benefits of cooperation and law and order. In effect, the Kurds had a ten year head start on the rest of Iraq, in the "how to create peace and democracy" department. The Iraqi Arabs, Sunni and Shia, who come north on business, or for a vacation, note this. The Arabs believe they are superior to the Kurds ("a bunch of hillbillies," to most Arabs), and find it irritating that the Kurds have made things work, while down south, especially in central Iraq, things are still a mess. Given another seven years, the Iraqi Arabs will probably catch up. But this is not a popular solution to the "Iraq problem," and no career-conscious journalist is going to talk about it."

"They refused to say what they were doing in an illegal tunnel that inexplicably blew up? Why would they need to spell it out for anyone?"

"In its sharpest criticism yet, China pointedly warned Wednesday "no one is going to protect" North Korea in the event of a test.

"I think that they have to realize that they will face serious consequences," Chinese UN Ambassador Wang Guangya said. [ Airborne pigs spotted again... -ed. ] "

"U.S. officials say the decision of some tribal leaders to begin going after insurgents reflects growing public anger over attacks that have killed or injured more than 8,000 Iraqis, according to local government figures. They also say there has been growing alarm on the part of some tribal leaders over insurgents' demands for adherence to strict Islamic law. U.S. military leaders say that alarm has inspired a sense of partnership that didn't exist earlier.

"It's only frankly been the last six months that they've recognized two things: One, they can't do it themselves, and two … they had much more in common with the coalition than they do with Iran," said a senior U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ..."

"In his 1908 masterpiece Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton explored the phenomenon of modern theologians who deny the reality of sin. "The strongest saints and the strongest skeptics alike took positive evil as the starting point of their argument," Chesterton wrote. "If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can make one or two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.""

"Every source in Cobra II, Fiasco, or State of Denial, may be accurate, but we will never know that, because for a variety of reasons the authors who claim they worked from notes and recordings, chose not to identify the most inflammatory sources by name. It would be as if I [Hanson] wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War and, to support my most controversial points, added footnotes that stated "A manuscript in the Vatican," or "Private letter to author from anonymous Greek shepherd attesting a stone altar in his field""

"But let me ask you one thing, if the best those tents can come up with to lead the largest deliberative body of the most powerful country on Earth are Dennis Hastert and Nancy Pelosi, isn't it time to start asking some serious questions? [ Roger can be rather difficult to argue with at times... -ed. ] "

"This young man's name is now one of Technorati's top search terms thanks to the conservative outing mob. Are you proud of sinking to the level of the liberal witch hunters? Shall we all shrug our shoulders now and accept the inevitability of turning into our own worst enemies? [ Let's be clear and this will end my commentary unless there's some new truly astounding revelation. Foley should be prosecuted to the maximum extent the law (ironically his I suspect) allows. And if the Republican leadership really did try to hide this in any significant way then they should be replaced. But making this the centerpiece of the current off year election campaign's denouement does nothing but reveal the true nature of our corrupt, National Enquirer minded media. And the sad level of mind control they have achieved over an educationally shortchanged electorate. Somehow the compare and contrast with the Gerry Studds and Barney Frank travesties seem not to come up -- I can't imagine why? Could it be that it wouldn't be to the Dems advantage? It would be risible if it didn't have such dire consequences for the very survival of Western Civ. Those few of us free-thinkers that remain anyway... -ed. ] "

"Nonproliferation efforts don't seem to be working very well. [ The perfect understatement. -ed. ] "

"WASHINGTON - Convicted terrorists locked up in U.S. prisons can still use mail and verbal communications to conduct terrorist or criminal activities, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

The inspector general launched a review after a series of NBC News Investigative Unit reports in February and March 2005 revealed that jailed terrorists — even those responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center — were continuing to support jihadists and encourage violence around the world. [ I'm not surprised ... are you? -ed. ] "

I have obviously not been giving John Howard his due:

"PRIME Minister John Howard has launched a scathing attack on Australia's left-wing intelligentsia, questioning its loyalty to the nation over the past decades.

In a speech delivered last night for the 50th anniversary of the conservative magazine Quadrant, Mr Howard said the left had a history of denigrating the nation and was now doing the same with the war in Iraq, describing Islamic terrorism as the new tyranny.

He said Australian universities were still breeding leftists and described pro-communists of decades past as “ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia and its interests”, Fairfax reports today.

Mr Howard said the left was wrong in its view that the Cold War was an equal struggle between the ideologies of the United States and the Soviet Union."

Kudos!

"So the label should have said -- in Day-Glo green letters on a phosphorescent-pink background -— “THIS IS A BED. USE ONLY WHILE AWAKE.” Or perhaps “IF YOUR IQ IS NOT THIS TALL, YOU CANNOT RIDE ON THIS BED.” Or how about an arrow pointing downward, with the legend “FALLING IN THIS DIRECTION COULD BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. FALL ONLY UPWARD OR TO THE SIDE.” ..."

"In proportion to their numbers, homosexual males seem to be significantly more likely to engage in sex with minors. Let’s take the homosexual priest problem that afflicted the Catholic church. It is again deceptive to call this a “pedophile priest” problem, since the majority of victims were post-pubescent teenage boys. This is apparently consistent with studies indicating that “While no more than 2% of male adults are homosexual... approximately 35% of pedophiles are homosexual. Further, since male-on-male pedophiles victimize far more children than do heterosexual pedophiles, it is estimated that approximately 80% of pedophilic victims are boys who have been molested by adult males.”"

I could implore you to RTWT, but that would be an understatement:

"12) Our civilization is destroying theirs. We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.

Another culturally-imposed blindness we have is the notion that everybody can get along with enough good will. There is absolutely no evidence to support this and a great deal to oppose it. Can the subjugation of women coexist with Western Civilization with Western media ubiquitous throughout the world? Can a pluralistic and tolerant society be governed by Islamic law? Can a modern economy exist where interest is forbidden and many forms of business risk-taking are considered gambling, and thus forbidden? Can a society that educates its young men by a process of rote recitation produce critically thinking, technically educated men to build and operate a modern economy? Can you even teach elementary concepts of maintenance to a people who believe that anything that happens is inshalla (As God will it)? To compete, or even just survive in the world they must become more like us and less like themselves – and they know this. "

[ Print it out and re-read it about a hundred times... -ed. ]

Careful Or Your Head Might Explode

Looks like another obvious fake propagated by the lying W:

"The path is long and difficult, and the enemy isn?t easy, for he is great and numerous and he can take quite a bit of punishment as well. [Ed.: This is very different from how al Qaeda wrote about the U.S. after the flight from Somalia.] I command you, my brother, and I am your brother and I have nothing except these words that are between the two of us and God as the third party, that you send messengers from your end to Waziristan so that they meet with the brothers of the leadership, and the rational and experienced people and the shaykhs here, because you have a greater chance to send messengers (brothers that you choose) than your brothers have here. [So al Qaeda's leadership is so pinned down that they can't even send messengers to Iraq.]

I am now on a visit to them and I am writing you this letter as I am with them, and they have some comments about some of your circumstances, may God guide you, with due confidence, affection, respect, and esteem. They wish that they had a way to talk to you and advise you, and to guide and instruct you; however, they too are occupied with vicious enemies here. [That would be us, I assume.] They are also weak, and we ask God that He strengthen them and mend their fractures. They have many of their own problems, but they are people of reason, experience, and sound, beneficial knowledge. [Note: al Qaeda's leadership is "weak."]

Know that we, like all the mujahidin, are still weak. We are in the stage of weakness and a state of paucity. We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength, or any helper or supporter."

Whatever you do, don't go read it. It might remind you of the turnspeak all around you...

"But I wasn't thinking of it in operational so much as psychological terms: What does that degree of abasement before their prejudices tell them about us? Mulling it over since I got back, I'd go further: It seems to me that one sign this war is over is when Muslims are grown-up enough not to go to full-blown baklava nuts over other folks touching their Qurans.

Of course, for the likes of Sen. Leahy, not only is the war far from over, it hasn't even begun. Almost every argument in this area isn't "about" the war so much as whether there even is a war. As the Washington Post reported, "The Senate joined the House in embracing President Bush's view that the battle against terrorism justifies the imposition of extraordinary limits on defendants' traditional rights in the courtroom."

Well, they're only "extraordinary" if you regard these men as traditional "defendants." If you regard them as traditional wartime detainees -- rather than OJs in turbans -- the only "extraordinary" aspect of this is the kid gloves with which not just their Qurans but the jihadists themselves are handled. This is the only war in American history in which enemy detainees have been freed before the end of hostilities. Of those released, at least 22 are known to have returned to the battlefield in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. The ones who remain are dangerous men, no matter how "sensitive" you are. They unscrewed the foot pads from those Asian-style toilets and used them as bludgeons to attack the guards. After listening to Pat Leahy's contribution to the debate, I wonder if the Gitmo medical facility's lavish team of mental health experts might not be more usefully deployed to the U.S. Senate."

"Rather than punish the electorate for the sins of the politicians, the BCRA contingent should have focused on the behavior of Congress first. If the Democrats and Republicans want to take the smell of cash out of politics, perhaps they would have been better suited getting the stink off of leadership assignments in the House."

"All of this is most interesting when placed alongside the other big news of last week, the National Intelligence Estimate’s assessment that the Iraq war is a “cause celebre” among Islamic extremists and a great recruiting tool for them. The NIE’s less-trumpeted conclusion was that Iraq only works for the jihadis if the jihadis are perceived to be winning in Iraq. Even before the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the U.S. military was reporting that al-Qaeda in Iraq was severely compromised. But if you don’t trust the U.S. military, you don’t have to take the military’s word for it. You can listen to Al-Qaeda’s own propaganda and the United Nations."

"For you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.... Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand."

"Well, well, well. It appears the Republicans actually can make the Foley controversy worse. As if it wasn't bad enough that John Boehner knew about Foley's track record of sexual harassment of his underage pages, now it turns out that Speaker Denny Hastert lied about what he knew and when he knew it. [ Washington: the eternal battle of mental midgets. GW -- you know, the one the capitol is named after? -- must be a veritable whirling dervish in his grave by now... -ed. ] "

"But the part I emphasized is the part that the Democrats keep coming back to...better intelligence, surgical military operations, using 'soft power to marginalize extremists', and getting allies...and there are more than a few problems with that.

The first one is that the same Democrats are the ones who keep kneecapping intelligence programs like SWIFT and they are the ones who led the charge to get the 'icky people' out of the humint business. They don't have a lot of credibility there.

The second is the classic Clinton 'ninjas from helicopters' fantasy. I've blogged my criticism of it several times in the past, but I'll lay out the three core objections here: a) it probably won't work (because we need huge networks within the target country to make such an attack work, and we can't and won't assemble intel networks in that depth everywhere in the world); b) it's immoral - we're talking a covert war of assassination here. Think the film Munich times 2,356; c) it consists of our committing acts of war in a number of foreign countries - something they may have a say about and a response to."

"In his dotage, Carter is proving once again that he is as malicious and mean-spirited a public figure as he is historically ignorant. And for all his sanctimonious Christian veneer, and fly-fishing, ‘aw shucks blue-jeans image, he can’t hide an essentially ungracious and unkind soul. . . . Carter’s Waterloo, of course was the Iranian hostage crisis. It was not just that his gutting of the military helped to explain the rescue disaster. Far more importantly, we can chart the rise of radical political Islam with the storming of the American embassy in Teheran and the impotent response of Jimmy Carter. [ It may be hard to comprehend, but yes, when history is finally pulled out of the Memory Hole, Clinton will seem like a boy genius compared to JC. Scary, isn't it? -ed. ] "

"Many people wondered about the connections between the ISI and the two Islamist groups. The ISI was instrumental in assisting the Taliban to power in the 1990s and has always had Islamist sympathies. If India has evidence of the connections it alleges, one has to conclude that either the ISI has gone rogue or Musharraf's surrender was worse than first imagined."

"War is rough work, incompatible with the postmodern, “gliberal” mindset, that permits fighting only if there will be no casualties, and assumes all offensive warfare is morally tainted. Mr Rumsfeld has moulded a fine offensive army, but for diplomatic and political, rather than military reasons, it is being used only on defence."

"This is true, and Pelosi is right to demand an ethics probe, to which John Boehner immediately agreed and the House supported unanimously. However, let's please recall the case of Gerry Studds and his sexual relationship with a 17-year-old page in 1983. This didn't involve a few e-mails and explicit instant messaging; Studds started a sexual relationship with a minor, and then announced in a press conference that people should mind their own business about his private life. The House censured Studds (he turned his back on them as the censure was read), but the Democrats endorsed Studds for five subsequent elections. The only reason he no longer serves in the House is because he retired. He didn't even lose his chair on the House Merchant Marine and Fishing Committee until 1995, when the Republicans took over and abolished the committee. [ To be clear: Foley should be locked up and they should thow away the key. I'm sure that's "disproportionate" to the current laws but that's how strongly I feel about anything even resembling child molestation. However, notice that there were no dissenting Republican votes. That, and the kind of Dem history noted by Ed is why I would never in a million years consider the Dems as anything but hypocrites with their latest puffing. -ed. ] "

"He also said more than 4,000 foreign militants have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 -- the first known statement from the insurgents about their death toll. It was unclear why al-Masri would advertise the loss of the group's foreign fighters, but martyrdom is revered among Islamic fundamentalists, and could be used as a recruiting tool. Analysts said the announcement was likely a boast aimed at drumming up support. "It's showing the level of dedication to their cause, the level of sacrifice jihadists are making," said Ben N. Venzke, director of the Washington-based IntelCenter, which monitors terrorism communications. "In a strange kind of way, it's almost showing a sense of strength and purpose in their cause to other people around world who might be thinking about joining the fight," Venzke said in a telephone interview.

In the topsy-turvey world of perception, analysts regard the admission of a heavy losses as a demonstration of al-Qaeda strength. Now for the bad news. Since conventional war does not seem to be working too well for al-Qaeda in Iraq, it is now seeking to acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. [ Now that's just shocking. 4,000 dead al-Qaeda? Why the Fascifists claim they would do way better than that. Especially since there aren't any al-Qaeda in Iraq. It's a proven fact you know. And everyone knows there will be no Tinfoil Apocalypse. Not a chance. Never. Why W is the great Satan after all. He's the one who's going to nuke the world don't you know? Wake up! Would Hugo lie to you? Why, he has an IQ vastly greater than Einstein -- it's irrefutable. -ed. ] "

"So there is history and mythtory. But with the right eschatall tale, you can know the end of the story and place contemporary events in their proper context. You may--dare I say--know the signs of the times, and discern them from the designs of the Times."

"2006 - 58 = 1948."