On the Road

Even I get a vacation every now and again... but now is not that time.

I'm packing my family and our stuff this weekend, leaving my adopted state of New York, and hoping to be comfortably and permanently ensconced in our new digs south of Raleigh, NC in time for fireworks on the Fourth.

Depending on just when Time-Warner gets my new cable modem installed, I should be posting again by the middle of next week.

Till then, Phin will keep and eye on things, and he promised me that if thing got too out of hand, he'd find out where your mom lives and mail her one of these in your name, so play nice.

No Iraq/9-11 Connection? Dems Need to Think Again

One thing that Democrats apparently cannot stand is when facts get in the way of their ideological narrative:

"The president's frequent references to the terrorist attacks of September 11 show the weakness of his arguments," House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said. "He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq."

I hope Congresswoman Pelosi will be sure to relate that point to the thousands of dead Iraqi men, women, and children and coalition soldiers who have died at the hands of al Qaeda in Iraq. I want to be there when Congresswoman Pelosi tells the families of dead American soldiers that their loss was not in a war against al Qaeda's Islamic terrorists. I want to be there when she explains that the al Qaeda terrorists who killed innocent civilians in New York, Washington, and Shanksville, PA, are not allied with and commanded by the same al Qaeda terrorists currently killing innocent civilians and soldiers alike in Iraq. I want to be there.

Pelosi is symptomatic of the myopic view of a Democratic leadership that cannot see the larger picture. To them, Osama bin Laden is the be all and end all of the War on Terror.

"The president's numerous references to September 11 did not provide a way forward in Iraq," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said. "They only served to remind the American people that our most dangerous enemy, namely Osama bin Laden, is still on the loose and al-Qaida remains capable of doing this nation great harm nearly four years after it attacked America."

Democrats would portray the capture or death of Osama bin Laden as the end to the War on Terror. This is decidedly not the case. Islamic terrorism did not start with Osama bin Laden, nor will it end with his capture or death. He is but one terrorist, in but one terrorist group, one of many terrorist groups fueled by poverty and oppression. Only by changing the cultures that spawn terrorism can terrorism be eliminated. George Bush and Tony Blair understand that, and seek to bring democracy in as a tool to help end poverty and oppression by creating conditions favorable for economic development and the free expression of ideas by peaceful means.

Democrats would have you believe that with the capture death of Osama bin Laden that the world would return to September 10, 2001. That world, that age of innocence, will never exist again. The Democratic leadership is in engaged in fantasy, not reality.

Iraq was an elective war, but a necessary war all the same.

We looked at Saddam Hussein's history of invading neighboring countries not just once, but twice. We looked at the fact that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was not home to just one terrorist group, but four, and that Saddam paid other terrorists bounties to perform suicide bombings against our allies. We looked at the fact of his harboring of the 1993 World Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yasin, and terrorist leaders Abu Nidal, and Abu Abbas.

We looked at the fact that he plotted to assassinate a United States President. We looked at his use of chemical weapons, which he not only used illegally in warfare against Iran, but in the genocide of his own people. We looked at the fact that he never fully accounted for the WMDs he declared in 1991, and that he kept the technology and expertise on hand to create such weapons in mass quantities on short notice again if he so desired. We looked at the fact that for more than a decade he thumbed his nose at sixteen U.N. Security Council resolutions, and that he continuously engaged in low-intensity warfare against the United States and other peace-keeping nations in the "no-fly" zones established after the 1991Gulf War.

After September 11, we decided that we had had enough. Saddam was not a direct threat to the United States, but he posed a threat as an enemy agent that actively supported Islamofascist terrorism. He allowed terrorist raining camps within his borders, and openly supported terrorism in other countries. He had the expertise and technology to supply al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with chemical and biological weapons. He would not attack America directly, but was sympathetic to the cause of and capable of arming those who would.

These are the reasons we went to war with Saddam Hussein.

That Iraq could become a democracy and thus give 25 million people a say in how their own lives were run was a side benefit, but it was not the reason we invaded Iraq. It has however, become the reason we've stayed.

There is something inherent in the character of Americans that makes us want to fight for and nurture the freedom of others.

There is something inherently wrong with a Democratic Party that fought against this fine trait of American character in forcing our withdrawal from Southeast Asia thirty years ago, leading to the deaths of millions and the oppression of tens of millions that still exists to this day.

It is a wrong only worsened by teh Democratic insistance on seeking to impose this same genocidal mistake on the people of Southwest Asia.

You Ain't Seen Huffin' Like the Flighty Quinn

Several days ago I wrote about a column in the Middletown, NY Times Herald-Record by THR columnist Beth Quinn, called "Proof is in the Memo: Soldiers Died for a Lie."

The article revolved around the so-called Downing Street Memos (DSMs); a group of seven leaked British government documents written in 2002 in advance of the coalition invasion of Iraq. Record columnist Quinn focused solely on the first of the seven DSM documents, echoing a claim of many on the far left that the document "proved" that President George W. Bush had "fixed" government policy around going to war with Iraq at all costs. According to this theory, Bush wanted war and was not pursuing any other options, and thus lied to the American people when he said in widely reported statements at the time that options other than war were still available.

Using this dubious claim, the Record's Quinn reiterated her claim over and over again that President Bush lied, and that 1,700 American soldiers died-"based on a lie."

It turns out lies were being spread, not by the President, but by Beth Quinn. Her outright lies and omissions of the truth never should have made it to print.

I cannot see where this is any less an offense than those cases of
embellishing, exaggerating and outright lying that got Janet Cook (Washington Post), Stephen Glass (New Republic), Patricia Smith (Boston Globe), and others fired for similar kinds of behavior.

Beth Quinn first misrepresented the initial Downing Street memo as "a report on a meeting between Rycroft and the White House in July 2002." This is patently false. As I mentioned in a previous article, the White House is never mentioned in the document, and the only mention of Bush was the comment that "it seemed" he had made up his mind. This is hardly evidence. This is the opinion of a person taking notes in the meeting, based upon hearsay. This hearsay turned out to be wrong, as two other documents in the seven DSMs went on to prove.

The David Manning memo flatly stated to British Prime Minster Tony Blair that, "Bush wants to hear you [sic] views on Iraq before taking decisions." Obviously, Bush had not made a decision to go to war if he wanted Blair's advice.

The Iraq Options paper (PDF) also said that the United States is "considering regime change." The fact it was still under consideration was further evidence that Bush had not, in fact, made up his mind to go to war as Quinn had claimed.

But Beth Quinn was not after the truth, she was after Bush. She cravenly and dishonestly concealed the documents that disproved her theory in order to falsely maintain her predetermined ideological position.

I confronted Quinn Monday (6/27) during a chat session set up by the Times Herald Record at the recordonline.com/ web site. What follows is a transcript of the exchanged between Quinn and myself, with comments from other readers edited out. I replaced my real name with Confederate Yankee in the text below so you know who said what:

Confederate Yankee: I would like to know how you can write an editorial like " Proof is in the memo: Soldiers died for a lie" and consider yourself a responsible journalist, when you deliberately misrepresent the context of the memo. You make the claim that the original DSM "is a report on a meeting between Rycroft and the White House in July 2002." That is patently false. The DSM was the minutes of a meeting-not a report-among top British officials. The White House is never mentioned, and the only mention of Bush was the comment that "it seemed" he had made up his mind. This is hardly evidence. Furthermore, you ignore the remaining six "Downing Street Memos" that contradict your claim. The David Manning memo to Tony Blair, one of the additional documents leaked, says in a telling line, "Bush wants to hear you [sic] views on Iraq before taking decisions." The Iraqi Options paper (PDF) specifically mentions that the United States is "considering regime change"-specifically indicating that the decision to invade had not been made. You either lied to support your position, or were not well-enough informed to write this article in the first place. Which is it?

Beth Quinn: The Downing Street Memo and several subsequent memos raise enough questions about what Bush knew and when he knew it to warrant a demand on the part of Congress and the American people to get to the bottom of it. At this point, there are two types of people in America: Those who want to determine once and for all if President Bush knowingly fixed the facts regarding Iraq, thereby misleading Congress and the American people into supporting an unnecessary war. And those who will cover their ears and hum loudly in order to maintain their belief that Bush and his advisors remain above reproach. You're in one camp or the other. Either you want to know if you've been lied to, or you don't. I would like to know. Beth

Notice how Quinn refuses to address the falsehoods I exposed in her editorial. Instead, her response is to try to imply that she wants to know the truth-about Bush-without owning up to her own falsehoods. It continues:

Confederate Yankee: In others words, you've affixed your ideology to the meme that "Bush lied, people died," and you're willing to misrepresent some key evidence and ignore other evidence to support your predetermined verdict of "guilty." You want Bush fired for lying to the American people, contending he fixed facts to build a false case for war. Why should we not hold you responsible for fixing facts to build a false case in your editorial?

Beth Quinn: Perhaps you didn't read my last response. What I said was that the memo raises enough questions that it's time to get to the bottom of it. If, at the bottom of it, it turns out Bush lied, he should be impeached. And Cheney and Rumsfeld should, quite possibly, be tried as war criminals. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. Thanks. Beth

Again, Times Herald-Record columnist Beth Quinn dodges, refusing to answer or even address her own lies, while still more than willing to try to advocate for impeachment for President Bush for lies that she says (and copious evidence disproves) he made. I tried again to hold her accountable:

Confederate Yankee: You're dodging my question. You misrepresented the content of the DSM, and ignored other documents that refute your primary contention. Why should we hold you to any of a lesser standard that Bush?

Beth Quinn: I didn't misrepresent this, and you're getting lost in rhetoric. Do you want Bush to answer the question or not? What standard are you holding Bush to, please? Does the Downing Street Memo raise ANY concerns for you, or are you holding your hands over your ears and humming? Beth

How Beth can purposefully misrepresent some of the Downing Street Memo, and make the conscious decision to hide well-known evidence that counters her ideological position, boggles the mind. For Beth Quinn, political ideology is apparently for more important than being honest with her readers. I had sent another follow-up question to Quinn, but she declined to answer it.

As Beth Quinn refused to accept responsibility for her misrepresentations, the next course of action was to inform her higher-ups, in this case, Editorial Page Editor Bob Gaydos (rgaydos@th-record.com) and Times Herald-Record Executive Editor Mike Levine (mlevine@th-record.com) to see what their response to this issue might be.

Mr. Gaydos refused to answer.

My email conversation with Executive Editor Levine which I will spare you for now, essentially stated that he saw nothing wrong with Quinn's editorial, and he expressed his intention to stand behind her.

So which is it?

Am I right in trying to hold Quinn accountable for misrepresenting the nature of one document and burying two others that torpedo her polemic, or do the rules of journalistic integrity not apply to editorialists in the least?

I sure would like to know.

Update: In addition to the readily available evidence within the Downing Street Memos that throws water on the Quinn polemic, the Senate Select Commitee on Intelligence released the Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq which "found no evidence that the IC's mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) capabilities was the result of political pressure."

Honey, I'm home...

Welcome one and all, to Confederate Yankee's new home on the web!

If this is your first exposure to my blog, I've got nearly nearly eight months of archives my web guru phin just imported for me that I'll start sorting into categories quite soon.

My favorite philosophying piscatorial pal phin and the wickedly witty lady Sadie are responsible for building Confederate Yankee as you see it today, and are soon to start their own blog design firm. I highly suggest you visit these two, as they have a scary amount of talent and can do wonders for the look and feel of your blog.

And now, back to the show...

Congressmen: Guantanamo Bay Torture Doesn't Exist

From News Carolina 14:

Returning from a one-day visit to the military prison in Cuba where suspected terrorists are being held, U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes said Monday that complaints about abuse at the prison are the work of people determined to "blame America first."

The Republican congressman from Concord said his Eighth Congressional District constituents would probably be upset if they saw how well the detainees at Guantanamo live.

"The most astounding thing to me was how nice the prisoners are being treated," Hayes told reporters during a news conference on the campus of Central Piedmont Community College." These folks are getting privileges that a prisoner of war under the terms of the Geneva Convention would not get."

Via the Winston-Salem Journal:

U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield believes many of the accusations of abuse of suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay "are, in my estimation, false," he said yesterday after his return from a one-day tour of the prison...

..."We did not see any evidence of abuse of detainees whatsoever. I know there have been widespread reports of detainee abuse, but we did not see any abuse nor did we see any evidence of abuse," Butterfield said at Raleigh-Durham International Airport. "Many of the reports you have seen about Guantanamo Bay are, in my estimation, false."

In case someone was wondering, Butterfield is a Democrat, and a former state supreme court judge.

There is no torture taking place in our terrorist detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There probably never was. It is too bad that so many people around the world want to think otherwise, and especially those here at home.

Ward Churchill Supports the Troops...

...we're just not sure for which army.

From Pirate Ballerina:

"For those of you who do, as a matter of principle, oppose war in any form, the idea of supporting a conscientious objector who's already been inducted [and] in his combat service in Iraq might have a certain appeal," he said. "But let me ask you this: Would you render the same support to someone who hadn't conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit?"

The Left just keeps reminding us how patriotic they really are.

Lying for a Living: THR Columnist Exposed

The Times Herald-Record's Beth Quinn has made it abundantly obvious that she's a columnist instead of a reporter. Reporters rely on facts when composing a story. Quinn's, “Proof is in the memo: Soldiers died for a lie,” editorial shows that she is unencumbered by such constraints.

The high-pitched polemic professes to be about the now infamous meeting minutes of top British government officials that became known as the “Downing Street Memo,” or the DSM. Liberals such as Quinn claim that the document shows that President Bush knew that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, and that he was determined to attack seven months before the war.

The DSM does not in fact show that. As a matter of fact, six more documents were leaked by the same source, and some flatly contradict the claim, but you won't here that from the Record's Quinn. She either didn't bother to research the subject, or made the conscious decision to ignore the evidence. It seems her hatred of President Bush was more important than the truth. Quite frankly, I'm surprised her editorial made it to print.

Even her understanding of the original DSM as a stand-alone document is nearly nonexistent.

Quinn makes the claim that the original DSM “is a report on a meeting between Rycroft and the White House in July 2002.” That is patently false. The DSM was the minutes of a meeting—not a report—among top British officials. The White House is never mentioned, and the only mention of Bush was the comment that “it seemed” he had made up his mind. This is hardly evidence. This is an opinion, and one that turned out to be wrong, as later documents showed.

Quinn spews:

What we're talking about here is proof that Bush engineered the war in Iraq – based on a lie. What we're talking about here is 1,700 dead Americans – based on a lie.

What we're talking about here is Lou Allen of Milford, Pa.; Brian Pavlich of Port Jervis; Eugene Williams of Highland; Irving Medina of Middletown; Doron Chan of Highland; Catalin Dima of White Lake; Brian Parrello of West Milford, N.J.; Kenneth VonRonn of Bloomingburg; Joseph Tremblay of New Windsor.
All dead – based on a lie.

There are lies being perpetrated, but they manifest from Beth Quinn, not George Bush. She presents the hearsay contentions of the Downing Street Memo as documented fact, but Quinn's fellow liberal Michael Kinsley said:

But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It says that war is "now seen as inevitable" by "Washington." That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if "Washington" meant actual administration decision makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C is saying only that these people believe that war is how events will play out.

In short, Quinn presents “we think he might” as “he said he would.” This is patently dishonest, especially when taken with the fact that the other DSMs explicitly state that Bush had not “fixed” his policy on an invasion.

The David Manning memo to Tony Blair, one of the additional documents leaked, says in a telling line, “Bush wants to hear you [sic] views on Iraq before taking decisions.” The Iraqi Options paper (PDF) specifically mentions that the United States is “considering regime change”—specifically indicating that the decision to invade had not been made.

Beth Quinn, by design and by obscuring facts that contradict her predetermined ideological position, lied to her readers. Even more disgusting is that Quinn would cheapen the sacrifice of our local servicemen in her quest to further her cause.

Quinn mentions that, “if it turns out he lied, as the Downing Street Memo most surely suggests, let's impeach him.”

I'm all for firing those who lie on the job. Perhaps we should start with Beth Quinn.

Contact the Times Herald-Record.

Google News: It's al-Qaedariffic!

Months ago Google News made the announcement that it planned to upgrade its news service to “rank news stories by the quality and credibility of the source.” San Francisco-based Google might want to hold off on those new patents for a while though, unless they really do consider State Department-confirmed pro-terrorist web sites as quality, credible sources.

Google News proudly features this “news” article from jihadunspun.com, a known pro-terrorist propaganda site:

From Jihad Unspun:

US forces shot and killed a nine-year old Iraqi girl as she came out of her school following final exams in Baghdad. A medical specialist in Baghdad's al-Yarmuk General Hospital told the correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam that an American sniper opened fire on ‘A'ishah Ahmad ‘Umar, killing her.

For its part, the US military occupation forces announced that they had begun an investigation of the Marine who shot the little girl and promised to punish him if he is found guilty.

A source in the Iraqi puppet army told Mafkarat al-Islam that the American soldier was very drunk at the time of the killing and that he was withdrawn from his observation post after the incident.

The father of ‘A'ishah, who works for the Railroad Department said that residents in the area where his little daughter was killed told him that the American had been betting with his buddies whether he could hit the little girl who had come out of the school some 700 meters from the US observation post.

For its part, the American propaganda TV station called “al-‘Iraqiyah” blamed what it called “terrorists” for the shooting of the little girl, but subsequent statements by the US military and the Iraqi puppet forces exposed the “al-‘Iraqiyah” story to be a lie.

Where to begin? The Newsweek-quality anonymous sources? Or the fact that there are no Marines in Baghdad (they are deployed to the west)? Or the fact that U.S. forces in Iraq do not have ready access to alcohol?

No, instead we start with the fact that Google News was the focus of an article by honestreporting.com on this same pro-terror site back in January. Six months afterward, Google still features the pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic web site as a valued news contributor.

One could presumably ignore honestreporting.com, but Google News also ignored the April 8, 2005 State Department warning of Jihad Unspun's suspected al-Qaeda support:

A trio of obscure Web sites and individuals has combined to spread deliberate disinformation, particularly about U.S. actions in Iraq. The entities involved are Islam Memo (Islammemo.cc), Muhammad Abu Nasr, and Jihad Unspun (jihadunspun.net).
Most of the disinformation appears to originate with Islam Memo, which is a pro-al Qaeda, pro-Iraqi insurgency, Arabic-language Web site based in Saudi Arabia.
Muhammad Abu Nasr, co-editor of the Free Arab Voice Web site (freearabvoice.org), translates material from Islam Memo into English and posts it as "Iraqi Resistance Reports" on his Web site.
Jihad Unspun publishes selected articles by Muhammad Abu Nasr, giving them a broader audience.

There are many sites of questionable veracity to draw news articles from, but in light of the well-documented pro-terrorist background of Jihad Unspun, one might start to question the motives of those at Google News that still consider Jihad Unspun a valid news source.

Note: Hat tip to Rusty Shackleford, himself a former Google News contributor, who alerted me to this story.

Update: Instalanched before I could even fix the spelling of "al-Qaedariffic." Thanks again, Glenn. More spelling errors are available free of charge to my valued guests on the main page.

Duncan Whines

Duncan Black, better know as Atrios of Eschaton mewls:

Ken Mehlman Says Liberals Want Our Troops to Die

So this is the nice quiet RNC chief who is so unlike that nasty Howard Dean:

Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman, speaking in Puerto Rico, said there was no need to apologize because "what Karl Rove said is true."

I'm with you, Duncan. I feel your pain...
Though Mehlman never made that comment, did he, Duncan? You made it up....

And I can't imagine where some might get the idea some liberals want out troops to die...

No, I can't imagine where people might get that idea at all...

Update: Welcome to all those coming in from Instapundit. If this is your first time here, please try the main page and have a look around.

Update: Leftist Ward Churchill rears he head to suggest the fragging of officers is a more effective way to protest war:

"For those of you who do, as a matter of principle, oppose war in any form, the idea of supporting a conscientious objector who's already been inducted [and] in his combat service in Iraq might have a certain appeal," he said. "But let me ask you this: Would you render the same support to someone who hadn't conscientiously objected, but rather instead rolled a grenade under their line officer in order to neutralize the combat capacity of their unit?"

I think we've got the new liberal meme well established.

Rove Blasts Liberals

Sorry, no original in-depth commentary on this one, but Instapundit seems to have the spread covered with an excellent selection. Go on over.

He needs the trafffic.

Words of Resignation

On Tuesday, December 10, 2002, Incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott issued a written apology over his December 5 comment that the United States would have avoided “all these problems” if then-segregationist Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948.

Lott had made the comment on the occasion of Thurmond's 100th birthday celebration.

In his apology, Lott said:

"A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embraced the discarded policies of the past," Lott said. "Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement."

Ten days later, under pressure from Democrats and Republicans, including Colin Powell and Jeb Bush, Lott resigned.

Fast forward to June 14, 2005.

The second-ranked Democrat in the United States Senate, Dick Durbin, compares the actions of American servicemen to the “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings.”

Durbin's comments comparing the actions of American soldiers to that of the 20th centuries most genocidal regimes drew immediate fire from Republicans—and a stonewall of silence from Democrats. Two days later on June 16, Durbin revised and extended his comments, insisting he said nothing objectionable.

Late Friday, Durbin said he was sorry if his comments had caused anyone to “misunderstand my true feelings,” but still refused to offer an apology for his outrageous rhetoric. Democrats—meanwhile, refused to comment, or tried to deflect criticism away from Durbin's slander. Not one national Democrat came out against Durbin's attack on America's military. Not one.

Only yesterday, one week after Durbin's calculated assault, did Chicago Mayor Richard Daley finally step up to the plate and say Durbin should apologize. Later, Durbin finally gave a week half-apology, stating:

“Mr. President, I have come to understand that was a very poor choice of words. I tried to make this very clear last Friday that I understood to those analogies to the Nazis, Soviets and others were poorly chosen. I issued a release which I thought made my intentions and my inner-most feeling as clear as I possibly could.”

Durbin shed crocodile tears, but he refused to shed his initial comments, offering no retraction, and instead tried to claim he was merely misunderstood with a dismissive “I'm sorry if…” speech.

• “I sincerely regret if what I said causes anybody to misunderstand my true feelings.”
• “I'm sorry if anything that I said caused any offense or pain…”
• “I'm also sorry if anything I said in any way cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military.”

Weasel words without a retraction. This is the “apology” of an insincere Dick Durbin.

2 ½ years ago, Trent Lott made a remark at a birthday party about the guest of honor and was driven out of office for his trouble. While his speech was an attempt to pay tribute to one man, it raised the specter of segregation and its racist policies. Lott had to go, and resigned as incoming Senate Majority Leader.

Now in 2005, in a nation at war, another Senator slanders our military by directly comparing their actions to some of modern history's most murderous regimes. His speech was not an accident or a misguided tribute, but a carefully crafted assault that he vigorously defended and has yet to retract.

Both Trent Lott and Dick Durbin have admitted to making “a poor choice of words” for obscene comments. It is only fair that they suffer the same fate.

Like Lott before him, Dick Durbin must go.

NC ACLU's Rudinger Wins One For Garner Sex Predators

Garner, NC Board of Aldermen voted 3-2 against an ordinance that would have prohibited registered sex offenders from entering parks owned by the town, saying that the ordinance was too vague and had too many loopholes.

Jennifer Rudinger, executive director of the North Carolina ACLU, apparently reviewed Garner's proposed ordinance under what appears to be a veiled threat of legal action, which the ACLU has announced it is considering against other towns that have adopted comparable ordinances.

Rudinger said:

"We certainly understand and support the city's interest in promoting public safety. But these overly broad laws that punish people based only on their status do not serve the goal of making the public safer."

But here's the kicker—Alderman Buck Kennedy offered Rudinger and the North Carolina American Civil Liberties Union a chance to contribute in drafting an ordinance to protect women and children in public parks from convicted sex offenders—and Rudinger declined to help.

I can only assume that the North Carolina ACLU viewed an opportunity to help draft a law protective of non-predators as a conflict of interest.

***

In not unrelated news, Ryan Hade who survived being raped, mutilated, stabbed and left for dead in 1989 at the age of seven in a Tacoma, Washington park, died as the result of a motorcycle accident June 9. He was 23.

Earl Kenneth Shriner, the brutal sexual predator that brutalized Hade, will sadly not be able to take advantage of the sex offender ordinance-free Garner park system, as he is serving a 131-year sentence.

The 33 registered convicted sexual predators in Garner, and 525 within Wake County don't have that problem.

Downing Street Downer

Voices on the political left have raised into a howl over what has become known as the Downing Street Memo (DSM), a document that claims to contain minutes of a July 22, 2002 meeting of British government officials in the build-up to the Iraq war.

Read the original Downing Street Memo,

A left-wing site dedicated to the DSM is available as well.

A quick review of the DSM conspiracy site above implies something nefarious is going on, but can't quite nail it down to specifics… but they know Bush did “something” criminal.

But what does the DSM really tell us?

Not much. It never could.

For starters, the document that became known as the Downing Street Memo is not a memo, or even a transcript of a conversation. It was, and has never claimed to be anything other than, meeting minutes.

Minutes are the paraphrased summary of a meeting. Informational points are presented and summarized, decisions noted, action items are discussed, and status updates for previous action items and decisions are presented for review. Unless transcribed from audio, they are at best the selective, paraphrased recollections of the individual taking notes during the meeting.

In practice, meeting minutes are the summary of several other summaries, filtered through one set of eyes, in fits and starts. If you have a good scribe taking minutes, he or she hopefully doesn't miss major points of the current conversation while trying to decide how to summarize what was just said. Minutes are only meant to capture high-level thoughts, and are notoriously inaccurate in the details.

That is the truth of the Downing Street Memo, and one of its many critical failure points.

Since the release of the original Downing Street Memo, other documents have come forth from the same source, and these documents flatly contradict the assertions some were making in interpreting the DSM. There was no early decision to go to war. There was no intention to set up a false WMD case.

The 9/11 Commission Report and several congressional probes also investigating these and similar claims also found that they had no merit even before the “discovery” of the DSM.

Proponents of the DSM as evidence of a smoking gun must also put aside the fact that Saddam was given a chance to comply with United Nations inspectors, and he made the conscious decision not to do so. Are we next going to hear that Saddam Hussein was in on the plan with Bush and Blair from the very beginning?

The Downing Street Memos, as the original and following documents are now collectively known, are historically interesting as they show insight into the British view of a relationship between two old allies, but that is their only real merit.

Someone gin up Lucy Rameriz. The Left is going to need more documents.

Abusing the Dead

Many, many heated words were exchanged in years of legal battles over Terri Schiavo, who finally died March 31 of this year after Michael Schiavo won the legal right to have her feeding tube removed.

Even in death, the battle still continued between Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents Bob and Mary Schindler, as Michael wanted Terri cremated and her ashes interred in a family plot in Pennsylvania, while the Schindlers wanted her body buried in Florida. Once again, Schiavo won in court, and most suspected that her ashes would be interred in Pennsylvania.

When I saw yesterday that Michael Schiavo seemed to relent somewhat and decided to inter Terri Schiavo's ashes in Florida as her parents had requested, I thought he'd decided to compromise. I had a bit of hope that this was a small gesture of goodwill and reconciliation towards the Shindler family.

That bit of hope was all too brief.

To backtrack for a moment, I don't think any of us are in an empirical state where we can categorically claim with absolute certainty which side was right and which side was wrong in this case. If Michael Schiavo truly believed that her was carrying out Terri's wishes, I can completely understand that at least in his mind, he was carrying out his promise. I would hope that under similar circumstances, that my wife would fight for me if she really felt that is what I wanted.

At the same time, I cam sympathize with the Schindler family, who felt that they were doing what they thought Terri would want. I am both a husband and a father. I see both sides, and I am torn between the two. While it is irrelevant here, my biggest gripe was the manner of Terri's death once it had been decided that she would die; but that is a subject for a different day.

At this point, only two things are certain.

Terri Schiavo is dead.

Michael Schiavo is an ass.

Michael Schiavo firmly ensconced himself as a first class heel as he went for the literal “last word” in against the Schindler family, using Terri Schiavo's bronze grave marker to strike out at her family one last time.

The marker lists February 25, 1990 as the date his wife “Departed this Earth,” and March 31, 2005 as the date she was “At Peace.” The obvious implication of this was that the Schindler's prolonged legal battle to keep Terri alive kept her soul in limbo from the time Michael claims she “departed this Earth” to her physical death fifteen years later.

Whatever their disagreements, using a dead woman's grave as a final insult to her family is unusually petty and cruel.

It may very well be true that Michael Schiavo never abused Terri Schiavo while she was alive, but he certainly abused her in death.

International Freedom Center Lies Again

The International Freedom Center, the left-leaning “blame-America-first” desecration of Ground Zero, has an “IFC Facts and Myths” page rife with misrepresentations misinformation ripe for a thorough fisking.

Take Back the Memorial offers it. Here's a sample of the outrageous deception currently engaged in by the IFC and countered by Take Back the Memorial.

From the IFC:

Myth:
The IFC is inconsistent with what 9/11 families want to see at the World Trade Center Memorial.

Fact:
The Mission Statement for the Memorial, which was crafted in 2003 and was the product of very substantial input from many family members, calls on us, through the Memorial, to “strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance, and intolerance.” That is what the IFC is about. A clear majority of family members on the WTC Memorial Foundation Board support the IFC and this Mission Statement.

The TBTM Fisking:

Truth:

The WTC Memorial mission statement appears in full on the TakeBacktheMemorial home page. IFC cherry-picked from this quote, “May the lives remembered, the deeds recognized, and the spirit reawakened be eternal beacons, which reaffirm respect for life, strengthen our resolve to preserve freedom, and inspire an end to hatred, ignorance and intolerance.” See anything in there about “Freedom's Failures?”.

Truth:
Three family members on the WTC Memorial Foundation Board are adamantly opposed to the IFC at the Memorial site. Here are the remaining four:

• a board member of the LMDC, which voted to bring the IFC onto the Memorial site and to give it $300 million federal dollars
• a personal family friend of the LMDC chairman; the only family member selected to be a Memorial design juror and who is now a Vice Chair, board member and salaried employee of the IFC
• a Vice President of Gilbane Building Co, which was awarded a $45 million contract at Ground Zero by the LMDC
• a former aide to Gov. George Pataki who now works for the LMDC

Read the whole thing at Take Back the Memorial. If it doesn't get your blood boiling then you don't have a pulse.

Make sure you sign the petition.

Contact the IFC and let them know exactly what you think of their project. Tell them Ground Zero is about 9/11, not their transparent political agenda which even IFC President Richard Tofel admits, “will host debates and note points of view with which you–and I–will disagree.”

A Ground Zero memorial isn't about debate, it is about honoring the fallen.

Tell Richard Tofel and the IFC that Ground Zero is no place for politics: theirs, ours, or anyone else's. Fight for those who can no long speak.

International Freedom Center
120 Broadway, 31st Floor
New York, NY 10271

Fax
(212) 336-6727

E-mail
contact@ifcwtc.org

Not Near Enough

A Teary-eyes Dick Durbin put on an unconvincing dog-and-pony show Tuesday, delivering a careful non-apology that neither retracted his slander of American soldiers, nor admitted fault. Dick Durbin is trying to get away with apologizing for making a bad word choice, not for minimizing the Holocaust and the killing fields.

As Ace said:

A genuine apology would disavow the Nazi-Khmer Rouge-Soviet comparisons. A genuine apology would distinguish between those hellish regimes and our own. A genuine apology would actually confess true error, not just in clumsy phraseology (an error of happenstance). A genuine apology would confess that his words were intentionally grandstanding and slanderous, and that these words were deliberately chosen for effect, not blundered into by some sloppy draftsmanship.

Durbin didn't issue an apology, he offered a blame-shifting feint. Infuriatingly, Durbin sought to hide behind the words of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, were he alive, would likely have throttled Durbin on the spot, while restating:

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged."

Right you are, Mr. President. Right you are.

Red-on-Red

Do you remember what I recently said here and here about splits in the different elements of the insurgency?

It is happening here.

Miserable Creatures

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin's outrageous comparison of U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the genocidal tactics of Nazi, Soviet and Cambodian concentration camps has exposed the moral equivalence and cowardice within the Democratic Party, as much for what Democrats didn't say about Durbin's remarks, as for what they did.

While reaction on the Right was swift in defense of our military against Durbin's seditious charges, all that has emanated from the Left is a deafening silence, or even agreement with Durbin's seditious comments.

There has been no outcry from any major Democratic Party figure, from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, would-be 2008 presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton, or anyone else on the political left. Nor has there been any grassroots outrage of rank and file Democrats that increasingly bow to the capricious and shrill whims of the radical MoveOn.org fringe of the party. Durbin has refused to apologize for his comparison, and Democrats have not pressed him for one. Many, it would seem, agree with his off-kilter assessment.

This leaves us to draw the frightening conclusion that the Democratic leadership really does feel that our military is on par with the Gestapo, Stalin's NKVD, and the Khmer Rouge. If this is the case—and Democratic leaders have given us no reason to think otherwise over this past week—then the Party of the People has devolved into the Party of Treason.

Durbin's comments—attributed to a faceless FBI agent who is in every way an “anonymous government source” like those that have misled the world on so many aspects of the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility as of late—have been a propaganda victory for the enemy, and an baseless, seditious slander of our troops.

Not one charge of anything even approaching torture has been substantiated at Guantanamo Bay, not one charge.

At most, those interrogating the terrorists—excuse me, “illegal enemy combatants”—at Guantanamo have on a handful of occasions improperly treated a book, and made living conditions almost as unpleasant for these terrorists as those our elite military units go through voluntarily during training or intra-service competitions. If we run a “gulag,” as Mark Steyn dryly observes:

...It's the first gulag in history where the torture victims put on weight. Each prisoner released from Guantanamo receives a new copy of the Koran plus a free pair of blue jeans in his new size: the average detainee puts on 13 pounds during his stay, thanks to the “mustard-baked dill fish”, “baked Tandoori chicken breast” and other delicacies.

No, Democratic hatred of President George W. Bush in particular and Republicans and general have led Democrats to decidedly radical positions that threaten the lives of our military with clearly seditious charges. Democrats cravenly seek a political advantage at the expense of the safety of our men and women in uniform, and that is despicable.

Dick Durbin joins a growing litany of hysterical Left-wing voices that will say or do anything, stoop to any level, slander any person or group, and yes, even commit acts of treason and sedition against this nation in their naked pursuit of political power. They say absolute power corrupts absolutely. So then does a blind chase for power when it consistently portrays fellow Americans as evil in a twisted bid to gain political influence.

The bared treason and sedition of the American political left is reprehensible; they're aiding and abetting of the enemy cause unconscionable. Durbin and his allies on the left would elevate the status of terrorists and murderers to that of legitimate soldiers, while tearing down a United States military that has been the last, best hope for human dignity and freedom against the forces of tyranny on this planet for most of the past century. 50 million people have been freed from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in just the last few short years, and yet the Left would undermine it all to undermine a single man, a president that they do not like.

Dick Durbin and his silent allies in the Democratic leadership would equate us with the most repressive regimes in history. Instead of segregating the actions of a few rouge guards at Abu Ghraib (acts brought to light by our military and prosecuted swiftly in accordance to military law, I might add) he would demonize all soldiers, sailors and airmen of the United States in pursuing his own power-mad agenda.

Durbin and his ilk consistently downplay the threat of terrorists, and would have America forget the actions taken by terrorists on September 11, 2001. Democrats downplay the very real and continued threat of Islamic terrorism, while insisting that our nation is deeply committed to criminal acts.

Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, and Dick Durbin are among the leaders of a 21st Century Democratic Party that stands with a shrill chorus of attack-America-first radicals that rejected the will of the American people, because on November 2, 2004, America rejected them. In their anger at their rejection, bereft on anything like ideas for the future of this nation, they instead chose to attack it, and care little for the collateral damage they create in the process.

Far from being supportive of our troops in harm's way, the party that marched under banners proclaiming “we'll support our troops when they kill their officers” would not even consider deaths resulting from their treason as those resulting from “friendly fire.” They've manifestly placed themselves on the side opposite of that of the will evidenced by the American people on November 2nd and opposite that of our men and women in uniform. Liberals have placed themselves against the families of those who perished on September 11th by trying to build a we-deserved-it “memorial” called the International Freedom Center at Ground Zero (NOTE: sign the petition against the IFC).

American liberals have become increasingly anti-American, to the point that they themselves seem to question their own patriotism, by always fervently claiming that we shouldn't question their patriotism. Perhaps someone should tell the Democratic Party that if they feel compelled to keep bringing it up, it might be for a reason.

John Stuart Mill, said that:

"war is an ugly thing. . . . but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worth war is worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature."

The Democrats, both by what they've said, and what they haven't, have proven to be the very "miserable creatures" to which Mill referred. Democrats care so little about the safety of American military personnel that they would embolden an insidious enemy in a pathetic attempt to score political points.

Democrats have crossed the line from being anti-Bush to anti-American. Let's hope they can find their way back.

A Coward's Way Out

Some Democrats and a few fair-weather Republicans (Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones, etc) are calling on President Bush and the Pentagon to set a withdrawal date for removing our forces from Iraq, thus fulfilling the Left's goal of losing the Iraqi war to terrorists.

While I find myself fighting (and occasionally losing) the urge to declare the American Left as al Qaeda allies, the setting of a timetable in Iraq would precisely mean that we concede the war to the insurgency. Too many good men and women, Iraqi and coalition partners, have died to allow this to happen.

As Stephen Green of Vodkapundit correctly noted:

…wars are generally won in one of two ways:

1. By completely eliminating the enemy's ability to resist.
2. By convincing the enemy that he's beaten.

For brevity's sake, we'll call these two routes "Means" and "Will." In the first option, the enemy's means of fighting are taken away from him. In the second, it's his will to fight that you take away.

He went on to say that eliminating the enemy ability to fight “just ain't gonna happen,” and that our other option, by default is to convince the enemy that he is beaten. He states further:

I'm not certain how you take the Will away from people who take their inspiration from God – but I'm pretty sure that, eventually, killing enough of them in large enough numbers would do the trick. Do we have enough soldiers on the ground to do the job? Do we, as a people, have the political will? Will the Iraqi forces evolve quickly enough to help us in this vital task? Can all this be done without completely alienating the Iraqi people?

While I generally agree with Mr. Green up to this point, I'd like to think (only history will tell, and it might prove both of us wrong) that his assessment might be a little off in his characterization of the insurgency we face in Iraq. While there is certainly a Jihadi element to the insurgency movement, it is important to recognize that there are two parts to the insurgency mix, and each has radically different goals. We may very well be able to remove the insurgents means to fight, as well as their will.

The 72 raisin-chasing Jihadists are out to kill infidels, and most are more than willing to take out Iraqi civilians along the way; many even conclude that Shias, Kurds, and even some Sunnis are infidels. Domestic Sunni insurgents, however, are generally more secular in their demands; they had a good life under fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein, and are fighting for their secular lifestyle as much as they are for their religion.

Iraqi Sunnis are at least as motivated by alms as Allah, and as long as they think their best option is an insurgency, they'll continue to fight. The inclusion and growing support of Sunnis within the Iraqi government will slowly but surely become the low-hanging fruit of disaffected Sunnis, and should the proposed amnesty deal go into effect, we could see many Sunni elements of the insurgency go quiet virtually overnight. We saw this happen with the Shia insurgency of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and there is little reason to doubt that the same carrot-and-stick appraoch might work for a similar horse.

When—and if—Iraqi Sunnis decide to try the diplomatic route, it would leave the largely foreign forces of al Qaeda in Iraq in a difficult position.

al Qaeda has already blown any foreseeable chances it had of turning this into a Muslim vs. European Infidel war when it began purposefully targeting Iraqis. They have, in effect, driven the majority of the population (Shias and Kurds) toward the uncertain future of an Iraqi democracy and away from the murderous certainty of militant Sunni radicalism. If the Iraqi government can co-opt the majority of Sunni insurgents by giving them a role in the political future of Iraq, they may place the remaining Sunni insurgents and their al Qaeda allies in a position where their logistical supply lines are sufficiently compromised as to reduce their ability to fight an insurgency. This is hardly assured, but seems to be within the realm of possibility.

Suicide bombers don't tend to make return trips, and if Iraqi Sunnis remove themselves from the equation, the mostly foreign fighters of al Qaeda will stand out like a sore thumb, turning them from the hunters into the hunted. Insurgencies only tend to work if they have a significant percentage of the population supporting them. If the Sunnis can content themselves within the political process, the “means” approach might work, at least, “enough.”

By “enough,” I'm referring to the tendency of “means” to affect “will,” and vice versa. A physically diminished force often encounters moral problems, and if the Sunnis insurgents largely abandon their al Qaeda allies, the al Qaeda recruiters might find it increasingly difficult to find people willing to join their cause. As Mr. Green correctly noted in the quote above:

I'm not certain how you take the Will away from people who take their inspiration from God – but I'm pretty sure that, eventually, killing enough of them in large enough numbers would do the trick.

If the Sunnis can be made to feel that the political solution is their best option, then what constitutes “killing enough” drops significantly.

Regardless of whether the insurgency dies by “means” or “will,” it is imperative that we stay there to ensure that the death of the insurgency is the end result. We have a moral obligation to finish what we started when we invaded Iraq, and that includes not leaving until the job is done. That job entails us defeating the insurgency and setting up an environment in which Iraqi democracy has a chance to thrive.

Because of this, setting an arbitrary date that allows the insurgency to go into hibernation until after we've left is precisely the wrong move to take. This would only create a situation where we—or even worse, the United Nations—would have to go back in later to re-fight a war we should have finished in the first place.

Setting a withdrawal date is exactly the wrong message to send to the insurgency, giving them hope where there should be none. The 25 million people of Iraq deserve better, and it is our responsibility to finish what we started. Anything else is a coward's way out.

Does it Matter?

Matt Drudge is reporting once again on allegations in the new Edward Klein book “The Truth About Hillary,” this time focusing on allegations that former President Bill Clinton is flagrantly cheating on Senator Hillary Clinton.

Drudge reports:

"Hillary's aides noticed that Bill seemed to grow even more reckless after his memoir MY LIFE became a big bestseller. Thanks to his record-shattering $12 million book advance plus another $10 million in speaking fees, he was rolling in money -- and hubris," Klein writes.

"Throwing caution to the wind, he started a torrid affair with a stunning divorcee in her early forties, who lived near the Clintons in Chappaqua. There was nothing discreet about the way he conducted this illicit relationship; he often spent the night at his lover's home, while his Secret Service agents waited in a car parked at the end of her driveway."

"It's one thing to go out to California with his wild buddies and stuff there,' said someone with intimate knowledge of the former president's philandering. 'But being indiscreet with a woman in Chappaqua steps over the line. That's the place Hillary calls home.'"

The book presents a photo of the former president 'mouth-kissing' an unidentified woman.

And there is indeed a picture of a man that appears to be the former Commander in Chief kissing a woman who is definitely not Hillary, though there is no context for the photo.

I have one question: does it matter?

I have no love for either Clinton. Bill is a philanderer, was in my opinion a weak if popular president, with few ethics and fewer lasting accomplishments. Hillary is a shrewd socialist hunting for a presidency of her own, and her ethical past is checkered, to say the least.

But isn't that enough?

Is there really a need to attack Hillary for being an enabler of a serial womanizer? Even if it does paint Hillary as an enabler of a sexual predator, does this really tell us anything we didn't already know about Hillary that we didn't know after the Lewinsky affair?

I don't see anything to gain from focussing on her personal failings, when her political failing are so much greater. We should focus on the failure of TennCare, the very real failing of her first foray into socialized medicine, and the recent flu vaccine shortage that was another direct result of her flawed socialist policy ideas. We should look at her radical political past, and her current refusal to condemn a fellow politician for comparing our military to the greatest genocidal regimes of the past century. Refusing to support our troops over such outrageous charges is reason enough to deny her the title of Commander in Chief. We should make these things our focus, not her personal weaknesses.

Her willingness to be a doormat for Bill's sexual conquests is irrelevant, except in that they serve to underscore her already well-known failures as a person of character. Hillary, almost certain to run for the White House in 2008, should be pilloried for her political failings, not her personal failures.

There are certainly enough things—Whitewater, the Rose Law Firm billing records scandal, Travelgate, and a lifetime of radical socialism far out of the American mainstream—to keep Hillary out of the White House.

Let's focus on keeping the debate in the public arena, where her long record of failure really matters.

Take Back the Memorial Rally Today

If you're in the NY Metro area, make it a point to be there:

Dear Families, Friends and Supporters:

For three long years we have played by the rules as set forth by Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. It got us nowhere.

We want a proper, fitting and respectful September 11th Memorial for the 3,000 innocent souls who perished that day. Not “a history lesson about tolerance.”

The planners of the World Trade Center Memorial have been put on notice that we are going over their heads to make our case to the American people. Please join us for a press conference to kick off our national campaign to enlist the American people in a Fight for Ground Zero. Our loved ones deserve no less.

WHAT: PRESS CONFERENCE & RALLY

WHEN: 12:00 Noon, Monday, June 20, 2005 (Please arrive at 11:45 am)

WHERE: Ground Zero at the Corner of Church & Liberty (rain or shine)

REMEMBRANCE: Please wear black or yellow to symbolize unity, or wear clothing that symbolizes your loved one's affiliation and bring a picture of your lost loved one to hold over your heart.

If you can't make it, be sure to email Governor Pataki, your Congressman, and your Senator.

Don't let the psychotic hatred of liberals for all things American screw over these people.

Ground Zero is about honoring those we lost. Fight the IFC.

Durbin-Inspired Clothing

Thanks, Dick.

This one's for you.

Update: I forgot the picture of the spokesman:

Thank You, and Pass the Rope

Over these past few days, I've worked up quite a bit of anger over the comments of Illinois senior senator Dick Durbin's comparison of American soldiers to the Nazis, Stalinists, and Khmer Rouge. Now that I've had a chance to cool down a bit, I think that instead of castigating Durbin, we thank Durbin, Hillary, and Dean for offering us a wonderful set of tools to use over the next few elections.

I am by no means saying that we should silently accept or ignore their comments; it is imperative that we respond proportionally and factually to each, providing a crisp, clinical dissection of their fevered rhetoric de jour as it occurs, but beyond that, we should be very judicious in our outrage.

While outrage is the natural response to the asinine comments that make up the bulk of Democratic discourse these days, it should be noted that these Democrats are in their own way doing exactly what President Lincoln suggested:

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged."

Republicans resign over morally bankrupt behavior. Democrats campaign on it.

We simply need to allow them the rope, they are quite capable of tying the noose around their own necks. As I've mentioned in the past, you've got to love a party whose platform includes a trapdoor with a quick-release.

We can temper our comments to generate appropriate levels of outrage, enough to let the voting public know that these remarks are beyond the pale of acceptable behavior, but we must be careful not to overplay our hand. As the last several national elections have shown, the American people are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, and we merely need to stay out of their way.

The voters will do the rest.

Guantanamo Bay, Illinois

"the whites of his eyes were nearly obscured by the red from blood vessels that had ruptured during the beating, and deep lacerations were held together by staples that had been applied to his scalp."

Is this more testimony from Democrat Dick Durbin about the Nazi, Khmer Rouge, and Stalinist tendencies of our soldiers at our terrorist POW camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba?

And while you ponder on that, remember that:

Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot" an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year.

...While not one single prisoner has died at the hands of soldiers in Guantanamo Bay.

So where was this outrageous example of abuse, if not Gitmo? It must have been Abu Ghraib, right?

No.

For real, systematic human rights abuses, the repeated brutal beatings of prisoners by gangs of sadistic guards, the rape of inmates by their captors, and even dragging of inmates through fire, we must descend into the very bowels of Hell:

Democratic Sheriff Michael F. Sheehan's Cook County Jail in Chicago, Illinois.

Real torture, real abuse, on Dick Durbin's home turf.

Read more of the damning Nazi-like abuse of prisoners (and subsequent cover-up) by the corrupt Democratic Cook County political machine at John in Carolina.

(H/T Michelle Malkin)

Durbin's Comments Waking the Dead

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin's recent comments equating the actions of U.S. soldiers with those of the Nazis, the Soviet gulag forced labor camp system and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge may have backfired, as fully two-thirds of those deceased veterans who voted for him in 2002 have changed their voter registration to Republican.

Dick Equates U.S. Military with Nazis, Pol Pot

Our terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay has remained in the news for months over mostly-unsubstantiated allegations of human rights abuses in a military prison built for enemy combatants in the War on Terror. Allegations include incidents of prisoner “abuse” during interrogations that sound more like fraternity hazing or a bachelor party depending on the specific charge, and the mistreatment of a book.

Instead of working up a proposal to save Social Security, or coming up with a version of an energy bill they'll support, or developing some sort medical-liability reform to save doctors from the malpractice lawyer lobby, or extending tax relief, Democrats have instead focused like a laser on a wind-borne drop of whiz that may have touched a book before an inmate flushed it down the toilet.

When I read it in WSJ Opinion Journal's June 16 Best of the Web, I was dismayed—but not surprised—to see that Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat (big shocker, I know), had joined the hysterical Amnesty International-led chorus.

Durbin topped Amnesty International shrill “gulag” rhetoric by comparing the actions of America's all-volunteer professional military to that of the Nazis and Pol Pot, forcefully implying that the American military has no concern for human decency, and was perhaps genocidal.

Durbin's bile can be viewed in the Congressional Record courtesy of the SF gate (PDF).

Durbin referenced a report from one FBI agent who had visited Guantanamo Bay:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold.

On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

Detainees—terrorists—were shackled to the floor? Without a chair, a snack, a bottle of Evian? The rooms weren't kept precisely at a comfortable 72 degrees?

Temperatures throughout the Middle East routinely reaching 110 degrees during the day. At the moment I'm writing this it is 111 degrees in Mecca at 4:00 PM local time, a temperature it is expected to reach every day for the rest of June.

Forgive me if I am unimpressed if al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are subjected to temperatures a little cooler—or a lot cooler—than those they would experience if they were left free to plot murder in the name of the Religion of Peace.

It might also come as a surprise to Senator Durbin that quite a few Americans listen to “extremely loud rap music” around the clock. Those of us who live in apartment complexes call them “neighbors.” Providing Abdullah with some thumping bass and crude lyrics might be an uncomfortable slice of Americana, but it isn't torture, or anything remotely approaching it.

Interrogation of terrorists who would like nothing more than to kill every man, woman, and child in the world (even you, dhimmi Durbin) who isn't enamored with Islam isn't pretty, nor should it be.

But making terrorists physically or psychologically uncomfortable is a far cry from the killing fields of Pol Pot where people were summarily executed for the most arcane of reasons. Nor is it similar to the Nazi concentration camps that gassed or starved people to death because they weren't “pure,” and conducted the random torture in the name of “medical experiments.”

All of these regimes, whether Stalin's Hitler's or Pol Pot's, Were murderous and totalitarian. Americans are neither of these things.

Perennially indignant shriekers on the political left have long maintained that making the terrorists interred at Guantanamo Bay anything less than completely comfortable during interrogation is “torture,” even though not one single charge of anything approaching torture has ever been substantiated. Leftists also continually whine about treating the terrorists according to the standards of the Geneva Conventions, despite the fact that illegal combatants such as the terrorists interred at Gitmo are specifically exempted from the convention and they fact that the terrorists were never signatories.

All of the coverage on the left about Guantanamo is designed with one purpose in mind; to attack President Bush by carelessly and maliciously slandering the U.S. Military for feeding, housing, and educating terrorists to standards far higher than they ever would have obtained in their own countries while running around free murdering women and children.

Dhimmi Durbin doesn't see it that way. He prattles on:

It is not too late. I hope we will learn from history. I hope we will change course. The President could declare that the United States will apply the Geneva Conventions to the war on terrorism. He could declare, as he should, that the United States will not, under any circumstance, subject any detainee to torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The administration could give all detainees a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention before a neutral decisionmaker.

Such a change of course would dramatically improve our image and it would make us safer.

We have learned from history, Mr. Durbin.

We learned that standing ideally by allowed Islamic terrorism to flourish under the administrations of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton. We learned that standing ideal or dropping a few bombs on camels and aspirin factories every few years does nothing to restrain those who would see our nation turned to ash. It emboldened them.

You confuse image with substance Senator Durbin, and our reward for this fatal miscalculation has been ten thousand casualties on attacks against American targets dating back three decades, with September 11th, 2001 the direct and devastating result of people like you who were and are unwilling to take the escalating threat of Islamic terrorism seriously.

Instead, you worry about terrorists suffering “degrading treatment” as if the issue of their self-esteem is even a worthwhile subject for serious discussion.

Your speech is an attempt to score political points, but instead puts the lives of every American at risk as you pander to the extreme left of the Democratic Party.

These are serious times, Senator Durbin. It is too bad you are such an unserious man worried more about trying to score cheap political points and get your name in the papers.

What a Durbin.

Update(s): Durbin won't back down, as reported by his favorite news network. Good. The only thing better than an idiot liberal is a vocal idiot liberal. I'll go ahead and pencil in that Senate seat as an "R" after '08.

The White House responds. I guess we can sew up the military vote for the next few election cycles.

Another Dick (actually his name is Markos, but it's close enough) has now said that torture conditions under US troops as as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein.

The Jawa Report is all over this, showing dim-bulbs like Kos what Saddam's turture was really like. (WARNING: graphic images).

I've always know that the relativism embraced by the left was morally bankrupt. Outbursts of incredible stupidity such as these just go to prove it.

Schiavo Postmortem Offers Data, Few Answers

An autopsy report on the body of Terri Schiavo released today confirmed that her husband Michael did not physically abuse her before he obtained a court order to have her killed.

The postmortem also concluded that Terri Schiavo suffered irreversible brain damage and could not hope to recover, regardless of therapy. Her physical condition was also more deteriorated than most people though, with the autopsy concluding that Terri was blind and suffering from severe osteoporosis Medical examiners were unable to find any signs of an eating disorder, meaning that the cause of Terri's 1990 collapse will likely never be known.

The autopsy of Terri Schiavo provides us only with data, not answers.

Based upon what we knew at the time, it would not have hurt anyone if Michael Schiavo relinquished control of his wife to her family. Terri would probably have not known one way or the other, but at least Bob and Mary Schindler would have had hope, if only for a while. Likewise, we'll never know for sure if Michael was carrying out Terri's wishes as he always claimed.

In any event, the long series of legal challenges seems to be an unsettling victory for those who desire for the euthanasia of the inconvenient, and the moral battles remain unresolved.

If nothing else, it comforts me somewhat to think it that Terri is in a better place now.

I'm not so sure about the rest of us.

Kofi Break

An email from a one-time Cotecna officer seems to reference communications between United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and the company that employed his son. Can you say, “rampant corruption” buys and girls?

I knew you could.

Cotecna, who employed the Secretary-General's son Kojo Annan, was awarded a lucrative contract by the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program.

The 1998 email from Cotecna vice president Michael Wilson was addressed to the company's top three officers, chairman Ellie Massey, managing director and CEO Robert Massey, and senior vice president Andre Prinaix.

"We had brief discussions with the SG and his entourage," wrote Michael Wilson on December 4, 1998, in an apparent reference to the secretary-general.

"We could count on their support."

Cotecna insists that it doubts such a meeting took place and that they would have strongly disproved of such a meeting. This seems to contradict a previous statement by the Secretary-General that Wilson was the person that he “really knew at the company.”

Cotecna's chairman Elie Massey twice met with the Secretary-General prior to Cotectna being awarded a $10 million-a-year contract by the United Nations, but insists that they talked of subjects other than the companies oil-for-food bid.

I would like to give Secretary-General Annan the benefit of the doubt that he was not involved in a scandal that may well prove to be the largest example of organized crime in human history, but is becoming increasingly difficult to do so.

It is a known fact that the Secretary-General twice met with the chairman of Cotecna, a company that his son worked for who was bidding on United Nations contracts. This is highly suspect behavior. Denials by Annan and Massey of impropriety are to be taken with the understanding that they may very well be concealing information that could lead them to be charged in a criminal court of law.

This email was written in 1998 when oil-for-food was still active, and despite Cotecna's down-playing of the incident, indicates collusion between Annan and senior officers in the company that employed his son. Wilson's email, while no smoking gun, points to a pattern of unethical if not illegal behavior by both Cotecna's officers and the Secretary-General.

It remains to be seen if Kofi Annan's actions and inactions in the oil-for-food scandal are illegal, but the information unearthed so far clearly establishes that his is incompetent and probably unethical.

Annan should resign, but I won't hold my breath. He stood by and watched 800,000 die in Rwanda without lifting a finger to help.

He is clearly a politician untainted by ethics.

Update: A second email from the same executive expressed confidence that Cotecna would get the bid because of “effective but quiet lobbying.”

Documentarian Overboard. Tsunami Warning Issued

Via ABC News:

A major earthquake struck Tuesday night about 80 miles off the coast of northern California, prompting a tsunami warning along the Pacific coast.

It was not known at the time which cruise ship was in the area, nor how Michael Moore was able to waddle far enough from the buffet line to flip over the ship's rail.

Members of a nearby Coast Guard station are reportedly involved in an intensive search.

What Democrats Stand For

...as cited by President Bush at a fundraiser at the Washington Convention Center.

(h/t: Drudge)

Words, Words, Words

Via ABC News:

To the victims of lynching 4,743 people killed between 1882 and 1968, three out of four of them black, the Senate issued an apology Monday night for not standing against the violence.

"The apology, while late, is very necessary," Doria Dee Johnson, an expert on the subject of lynching and the great-great-granddaughter of a victim. "People suffered. When the United States government could have done something about it, it did not."

Two words come to mind. “Bull” is one. You can guess the other.

The same article later continues:

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the Senate's only black member, said, "I do hope that this chamber also spends some time … doing something concrete and tangible to heal the long shadow of slavery and the legacy of discrimination so that 100 years from now we can look back and be proud and not have to apologize once again."

Let me respond to Senator Obama (Or as Uncle Teddy likes to call him, “Osama bin Obama”) by saying that the chamber did do “something concrete and tangible to heal the long shadow of slavery.” In fact, it did quite a few things:

• The 13th Amendment abolished slavery and was ratified on December 6, 1865.
• The 14th Amendment gave automatic citizenship to all former slaves, and was ratified July 9, 1868.
• The 15th Amendment ratified February 3, 1870, ensured that a person's race, color, or prior history as a slave could not be used to bar that person from voting.
• The 24th Amendment eliminated the poll tax, was ratified on January 23, 1964, eliminating one of the last legal vestiges of segregation.

These constitutional amendments are of course in addition hundreds of civil rights bills, appropriations bills, federal programs, and resolutions that have been passed to help minority communities over the years.

It might be of some historical note to Senator Obama that all four of these constitutional Amendments were necessary to counter the tendency of southern Democrats and their Ku Klux Klan confederates to try to marginalize blacks—often violently—something that still continues today.

The ABC News article continues in the very next paragraph:

Simeon Wright said, "Good men did nothing" as his cousin, Emmett Till, was dragged from his uncle's Mississippi home and murdered, reportedly for whistling at a white woman. Wright, who was there the night Till was abducted in 1955, said that if there had been a federal anti-lynching law, "there was no way men would have come into my house and taken him out and killed him."

Mr. Wright, do you care to run that by me once again?

The abduction and murder of your cousin Emmitt Till is shocking and tragic, just like the abduction and murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three young men murdered by Klansmen in the summer of 1964 for helping blacks in Mississippi register to vote. Both of these cases were lynching, and a federal lynching law wouldn't have averted either one of these cases, nor the 579 other lynchings that happened in Mississippi between 1882 and 1968.

Not a single one.

While the rhetorical flourishes are nice, the Senate apology means nothing. It is political grandstanding, three decades too late. The legislation the Senate filibustered would have meant nothing to the ignorant racist thugs that carried out these attacks and the thousands more just like them.

Nothing.

Both of these assaults, and probably the vast majority of other lynchings, were planned with malice aforethought. A civil rights law not would dissuade single-minded, bigoted predators already willing to commit premeditated murder and kidnapping.

A senate confirmation of anti-lynching legislation, whether passed 105 years ago or in 1963, would have changed nothing. Mr. Wright's words are wistful and full of emotion, but they have no bearing on reality.

This Senate apology is a resolution of words, not substance. At least one other person seems to feel the same way.

"If you hit someone with your car, but you apologize, he's still hurt. It's (the apology) a good idea, but it's too late."

His name is James Cameron, and he should know. Now 91, he is the only known survivor of a lynching.

The practice of lynching came from intolerance and hatred, two things of which the Senate and politics in general are never in short supply. While Robert Byrd's favorite tool of the filibuster stalled federal legislation about lynchings, it was only changes in the greater society itself that led to the near disappearance of lynchings in American life.

The American people have long since passed the time of race-motivated public lynchings.

It is time the Senate does the same.

Note: Via Instapundit, David Hardy weighs in (correctly) that is the Supreme Court, not the Senate, that should be issuing an apology.

Divide & Conquer

As terrorist attacks by the insurgency are estimated to be peaking, The Iraqi government seems to be using diplomacy in an effort to drive a wedge between native Iraqi insurgents and their foreign al Qaeda allies:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. and Iraqi officials are considering difficult-to-swallow ideas — including amnesties for their enemies — as they look for ways to end the country's rampant insurgency and isolate extremists wanting to start a civil war.

Negotiations have just begun between U.S. and Iraqi officials on drafting an amnesty policy, which would reach out to Iraqi militants fighting U.S. forces, say officials in both the Iraqi and American governments.

But foreign extremists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, responsible for Iraq's bloodiest attacks, would not be offered any amnesty, the Iraqi and U.S. authorities told The Associated Press in recent days.

The amnesty proposal is seen as a key weapon to split the insurgency between Iraqi and non-Iraqi lines and further alienate foreign fighters like al-Zarqawi.

So what does this really mean?

Negotiated solutions via internal politics were always the preferred option in deciding the future of Iraq from the coalition's standpoint, but Sunnis did not want to cede the power and control they wielded under Saddam's regime. Fighting against this loss of power is the basis for the Sunni-led insurgency. The domestic element of the insurgency was their way of trying to leverage a better position for themselves than they thought they would have in a post-Saddam Iraq.

In contrast, Iraqi Kurds and Shiites were aware early on that their best prospects for the future are tied to the success of the fledgling Iraqi national government.
Insurgent attacks by primarily Sunni insurgents just went to reinforce this belief.

As it became increasingly apparent that the fledgling Iraqi government would not bow down to the insurgency and elections were successfully held, it buoyed faith among most of the people that they could build a better future for Iraq. The upswing in insurgent violence around the elections and since has not seemed to dissuade the Iraqi people's attempt for democracy; instead it seems to have tempered it.

The insurgency, sensing that they are losing the support of the Iraqi people, has attempted to bomb the civilians into compliance with their wishes. But every new insurgent attack against civilians seems to have had the opposite effect; instead of being intimidated, the Iraqi people are becoming increasingly fed up with the insurgency.

And the insurgency is indeed having problems.

The insurgency was never a monolith, with Sunni Iraqi insurgents fighting for power within a new Iraq having completely different goals than the foreign fighters of al Qaeda intent on killing infidels (Iraqi and foreign) for their brand of radical Islam.

While the growing dissatisfaction with the insurgency matters little to the foreign jihadists (other than making things more difficult), the pressure is beginning to wear on Sunni insurgents that see their guerilla military efforts accomplishing very few, if any of their goals. A political option is increasingly in their best interests, as continued attacks only erode both their manpower and political position.

It is into this gap between al Qaeda's foreign fighters and the Sunni insurgency that the Iraqi government intends to drive a wedge. By offering amnesty for Sunni insurgents who lay down their arms, the Iraqi government is giving them a chance to join the political process instead of fighting against it.

The much talked about tipping point will occur when Sunni leaders in the insurgency realize that it is in their best interests to fight for their people in the political arena instead of the streets of Iraq. Once the Sunni insurgency is dissolved, an isolated al Qaeda insurgency cannot long stand. Insurgencies only succeed when they have the support of the people, and without assistance from Sunnis, al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq will be living on borrowed time.

Keep Up The Pressure On The IFC

From Men's News Daily:

Future visitors to the 9/11 memorial that's planned for the rebuilt World Trade Center site won't learn what we learned that day. They won't learn about terrorists murdering defenseless civilians in the name of their vicious version of Islam. They won't learn about the horror, the grief or the pain we all felt, or how we came together as a united nation... at least, until we began to fight back. They won't learn how ordinary Americans rose to the stature of heroes, or the reasons for our determination to root out terrorism wherever it is found. They won't learn what we learned at all; they won't feel what we felt. That's not politically correct, you see. Instead of a memorial honoring the dead, both the innocent victims and the brave men and women who died trying to save them, visitors will "learn" that America "deserved" what we got.

My dislike of liberal ideology is evident, pervasive, and capitalistic. I find them spineless, opportunistic, and morally bankrupt.

So it was with very little surprise that I found that the party of bloated stupidity, self-righteous hypocrisy, and gluttonous indulgence, was virtually foaming at the mouth (and out of George Soros' pockets) to blame the victims of September 11, 2001 for their own deaths.

We cannot let this stand; must not less this be ignored.

Please, go to Take Back the Memorial and use the contact information there to make your voice heard.

Your voice matters.

Do not let the memories of these people become victims of the Left's cowardly, craven attempt to turn a tragedy into grist for their attempts at ideological indoctrination.

Ground Zero should be politics free. It should be a place of reflection, reverence, and rememberance.

via Globe & Mail.

Don't let liberals play political games slandering the memories of the dead.

Take Back the Memorial. Not for me. Not for you.

Do it for them, and those they left behind.

Open Borders, Open Graves

Now if only Bush will follow suit...

I've always been a conservative first and a Republican second, and I am increasingly becoming disgusted at the Bush Administration's unwillingess to confront immigration issues, especially our all-too-porous borders.

I'm pro-immigration, and I favor allowing more legal immigration with certain constraints (work visas, not permanent citizenship, and that includes the children of work visa immigrants born here) for guest workers from Central and South American countries.

But by refusing to address border control issues, President Bush has severely compromised Homeland Security efforts. If we have another catestrophic terrorist attack on United States soil because the federal government refuses to do their jobs, the blood of the men, women, and children who die and are maimed will be the responsibility of the White House.

Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate are pandering to the growing Hispanic lobbies as well, but the ultimate responsibility stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. President Bush, your primary duty is to the safety of this country's citizens.

It's time to step up to the plate.

A Man Without Decency

According to Drudge, Edward Klein's new book The Truth About Hillary makes the claim via an anonymous source that former President Bill Clinton made the incredible claim, "I'm going back to my cottage to rape my wife,” while on a Bermuda vacation in 1979.

The anonymous source then claimed that the Clinton's room, "looked like World War III. There are pillows and busted-up furniture all over the place," implying that a very violent rape did indeed occur. The same source also claimed Bill Clinton only found out about Hillary's resulting pregnancy by reading about it in the Arkansas Gazette, and that President Clinton was completely unfazed that he found out about the pregnancy in the newspaper instead of from his wife, instead boasting:

'Do you know what night that happened?"

"'No,' I say. 'When?"

"'It was Bermuda,' he says, 'And you were there!'"

I have some hope that these allegations Drudge attributes to Klein's book are untrue, but if Klein does in fact make these incendiary charges in his book, then Klein has stooped to a low I've not yet seen in covering the lives of political figures.

Klein's unnamed source is most likely lying, and even on the off chance that the story turned out to be true, it still does not bear repeating. Just when you thought the caliber of person the NY Times would hire has hit rock bottom, the former NY Times Magazine and former Newsweek foreign editor Klein tunnels feverishly toward the earth's molten core.

This is triple character assassination, pure and simple.

Neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton nor their daughter Chelsea should be smeared in such an irresponsible manner. Bill Clinton has a history as a womanizer dating back decades, and Hillary has been criticized for sticking around for it, but neither deserves this unprecedented, unprincipled assault upon their characters. Most assuredly, this scurrilous attack most deeply affects the very being of Chelsea Clinton, and this unnerving and unwarranted assault against her is completely unforgivable.

I can only hope that one day Edward Klein will discover that “fist” can be a verb—and Hillary will write a book about it. As that is highly unlikely, Klein deserves to be sued—hopefully into bankruptcy—should the story prove to be without merit. Even if the story does turn out to be true, it still did not warrant publication.

Some things you simply don't do out of a basic respect for innocent people. Apparently all those years working for the liberal Times and Newsweek stripped away any vestiges of decency Klein may have once had.

Difference between Interrogation and Torture

It is interrogation when you use Christina Aguilera music to keep prisoners awake.

It is torture if you use this guy.

Listening to pop music, being made to stand a long time, forced removal of clothing and facial hair, hanging pictures of scantily clad-women around their necks--were these log books gathered from Guantanamo Bay, or just a random fraternity house?

"Torture" at Arizona State University, 1937

I'm sorry, while this stuff it is uncomfortable, and maybe even humiliating, it isn't torture.

It isn't even close.

Overplaying The Downing Street Memo

[06-26-05 Update: Welcome Times Herald-Record readers! By now you've likely read Beth Quinn's hysterical editorial on the Downing Street Memo. This is one of two articles I've written on the Downing Street Memo. Read the second article, "Downing Street Downer" to understand why Beth's "proof" has absolutely no merit.]

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” goes the old canard from the (relatively few) half-baked half-wits that half-finished college when I was at East Carolina in the early-to-mid 1990s.

Like other clueless ideologues from the Berkshires to Berkley, they sincerely if only half-lucidly believed that capitulating to tyrants would somehow make the world a better place.

These people naively held, and indeed many still do hold, the sincere, bong-induced belief that happy thoughts will solve the words ills, that it is all just a matter of coming to a mutual understanding. Much of this crowd would like us to cut our military down to bare minimum levels—just enough to stop the enemy before they make it to Beverly Hills or the Hamptons. This is the “bake sales for bombers” crowd.

These people are fools.

"In peace prepare for war, in war prepare for peace. The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence under no circumstances can it be neglected." –Sun Tzu, circa 500 BC

Despite this, the Internet, especially center-left blogs, have been in an orgasmic frenzy over what is being called the “Downing Street Memo.” The memo purports to be the secret minutes of a meeting of a handful of high-level British government officials that took place July 23, 2002, eight months prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

I'd avoided talking about it until this point for several reasons.

Some on the right would point to the fact that there is not a single credible source confirming this memo's authenticity, and that it could have been fictitiously written just like the fake documents dredged up by CBS News. Only “anonymous government sources” have confirmed this document. Pardon me, Michael Isikoff, if I take“anonymous government sources” with a grain or two of salt.

But even if the Downing Street Memo is fake, I certainly hope it accurately reflects what was going on behind the scenes.

According to the memo, recent talks in Washington noted:

“…a perceptible shift in attitude. War was now seen as inevitable.”

A perceptible shift in attitude? I should certainly hope so.

Just ten months after September 11 Americans were still raw with the realization that far away terrorist regimes could indeed strike the United States. Those who kept abreast of the subject knew that Iraq played a role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by being a refuge for the bomb-builder, and Iraq had put into motions plans to assassinate President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait.

Despite continued diplomatic pressure in the form of international sanctions, two regional wars, and a violently crushed rebellion, Saddam was still firmly in power. With little hope of a coup arising, and Saddam a continued threat to U.S. interests in the region, war was indeed inevitable at some point. The only question was, “when?”

After September 11 and the still unsolved anthrax attacks, taking out a rouge nation with a previous and flaunted history of using WMDs against both its own people and foreign nations became not just a matter of “when,” but “how soon?” in many people's estimations.

Another failure point of the memo, as pointed out by liberal Michael Kinsey, is that the memo is hardly a smoking gun impeachment document liberals have been slobbering for. Liberals harp on the claim that Bush was lying over his position about the war. But the Memo doesn't come close to supporting that assertion:

But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It says that war is "now seen as inevitable" by "Washington." That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if "Washington" meant actual administration decision makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C is saying only that these people believe that war is how events will play out.

Once again, liberal hysteria is borne out only in their “reality-based” fantasy world, not in actual reality. It is quite possible, that Bush, in preparing for war, was hoping for peace, following Sun Tsu's time-honored advice. The memo simply does not address the assertion of a pre-determined war made by the left.

So the far left shrieks"cover-up!" and the rest of the world yawns.

One would be tempted to think that there is no outrage because there's nothing to hide.

Note: Also read "Downing Street Downer" to understand why the Downing Street Memo isn't the "smoking gun" liberals hope it would be.

More Dishonor From the IFC

Yet another reason we cannot allow the Americans Deserve to Die Center to be built at Ground Zero.

Shooter Control

From CNN:

More than a dozen Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies will be disciplined for their roles in a controversial shooting incident in which more than 120 rounds were fired at a vehicle driven by an unarmed suspect, Sheriff Lee Baca announced Thursday. The 13 deputies will face punishments ranging from written reprimands to 15-day suspensions, Baca said.

During the May 9 incident, a suspect led police on a 12-minute chase through Compton, considered one of the more dangerous cities in Southern California.
The chase ended when officers surrounded the vehicle and opened fire. The driver, 44-year-old Winston Hayes, was hit four times but survived.
One deputy was also wounded, Baca has said, possibly by so-called friendly fire...

…Baca said the department has changed its policies on firing at moving vehicles, requiring that deputies independently decide whether to shoot, rather than all firing at a single command.

Um, yeah.

I watched the video several times, and the things that amazed me most about this incident were (a) the shoddy marksmanship of the L.A. County Sheriff's Dept., and (b) a complete and utter disregard for fire discipline by the deputies on-scene.

Part of the problem involves policy.

As noted above, deputies were told to fire at a single command. While the details of the shooting policy in place at the time are not explicitly detailed, the implication is that deputies were compelled to fire at a verbal command, regardless of how advantageous their firing position was at the time. This means that a deputy at the right rear of the vehicle (and there was more than one shown on the video) or other position without a clear line of site to the target (or anything else behind the target) was expected to discharge his weapon.

This is a patently dangerous policy.

Obscured by the mass of the SUV driven by the suspect, these deputies were quite literally firing blind, and had little chance of hitting the suspect. In addition, the bulk of the vehicle blocking their line of site also meant that they had little indication of where the rounds they fired might end up. Where these rounds did end up was obvious—in one deputy, and in the walls of houses in the area in addition to the suspect vehicle. With 120 rounds fired in a circular firing squad (men in a circle, firing at a target in the middle), it is a minor miracle that no one died.

Luckily, this “spray and pray” policy has been abandoned in favor of a policy relying on the independent judgement of individual officers. This is a move in the right direction, but it only will work if training is sufficient, both in terms of combat marksmanship and in terms of teaching proper shoot/no shoot situations.

It may be a surprise to many, but most police officers are not “gun people.”

They are people who have dedicated their lives to public service, and more often than not in law enforcement, a handgun (and occasionally shotguns, carbines, and true assault weapons for SWAT or ESU teams) is just another piece of their gear. Many officers never fired a gun before joining law enforcement, and many officers never take their guns out of their holsters except to maintain a department-mandated level of basic proficiency. Herein lies the problem.

Law enforcement officers generally only deploy their handguns in high-risk situations when they perceive a threat to themselves or others. In these situations their pulse rate quickens and as a result, the fine motor skills needed to accurately shoot a handgun diminish significantly. At this point, their training completely fails them.

Firearms training for many officers around the country still follows an archaic system of shooting at un-obscured static (non-moving) paper targets from a fixed position in the known and usually well-lit environment of indoor and outdoor shooting ranges.

These situations are completely divorced from the reality of a world where the “target” is often at least partially hidden, prone to quick, often erratic movements, and quite capable of returning fire. In addition, instead of occurring in a range where downrange safety is assumed and almost a given, most officer-involved shootings occur in populated areas where there is a significant risk of downrange targets being hit be the officer's bullet.

What's more, it is quite possible and even likely that with the kind of ammunition used by most departments (zero-expansion “ball” and controlled-expansion hollowpoint bullets), that even a direct hit on the target can overpenetrate, going completely thorough the suspect and killing or maiming innocent bystanders.

Because of this unrealistic training environment, officers are all but doomed to fail in the real world, as this example by the L.A. Sheriff's Dept. shows.

In an ideal world, police officer's would be trained in the high-stress and varying “shoot house” environments common to emergency services and SWAT team personnel, where officers are forced into unknown situations with “no shoot” civilians, and physical barriers controlling the tone for the engagement.
Unfortunately, these live-fire “shoot houses” are themselves hazardous for officers without significant levels of training, and are prohibitively expensive to maintain.

A compromise can be struck between these two extremes that while still not ideal, is significantly better than the “old school” range training too many departments still use. Departments can build less expensive “shoot house” environments and officers can be training using so-called “simunitions,” which are special training cartridges that function in the officer's duty weapon (thus better familiarizing officer's with their weapon in high-stress environments) while not posing lethal risk.

Until these more realistic training environments become standard, you can continue to expect more situations where officers put themselves and others at risk due to antiquated training and policies.

Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season

It's that time of year again, and Arlene, the first named tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, is churning for a Gulf coast landfall as we speak. Therefore, as a public service from a North Carolina native who's been through more hurricanes than Tammy Faye Bakker's been through makeup, I present to you:

Confederate Yankee's Guide to Dealing with Hurricane Season

Days Before the Storm Arrives

1. Move. Seriously, people in Idaho never have to deal with this crap.
2. Get milk and bread. Nobody seems to know exactly why, but I'm pretty sure it's the law.
3. Send Mama and the kids away to her folks for a few days.
4. Go to the beach and grab a seat in the dunes. Huge waves are cool to watch crashing on the beach, and if you're lucky, you can see some idiot from Quebec get swept out to sea. Screaming is funny in French.
5. Go home.
6. Throw all the crap you don't want any more in the yard. If the storm surge comes you can avoid a dumping fee, and if it doesn't, you can use all the debris to convince the guys from FEMA that it did and they'll cut you a big, fat check.

The Day before the Storm

1. Get more beer. Lots of it. If you're living in hurricane country, you might as well make the best of it.
2. Get ice. That way your beer stays cold even if you lose power for a couple of days.
3. Get one of those huge 490-quart Igloo coolers that looks like chest freezer, but bigger. It'll keep your iced beer cold, and can be used as a raft. Put it in the bass boat tied to your back porch.
4. Board up the windows of your trailer. You already have all the boards numbered from last year, so it should be a snap. Put all the crap you really need (rifles, radio, lawn chairs, cans of vienna sausages, etc.) in a big waterproof bag and tie it tightly well off the ground in a nearby tree.
5. Invite your best buddy over. Remind him to bring his cooler.
6. Wait.

Landfall

1. Sit inside and drink beer. Watch that 90-pound girl reporter from the local television news crew get battered by the wind and sideways rain while doing a live report. Take bets on whether or not the cameraman will warn her about that dumpster bearing down behind her. Wonder why he hates her so much. Giggle until you loose power.
2. Put on your lawn ‘n leaf bag and step outside for a smoke. Wow, those 100 MPH lighters really do work.
3. Go out back, get in the boat, and tie a rope around your cooler. Mount up. When the storm surge comes, you can ride that bucking 490-quart beast like a bull.
4. Yee-haw!
5. Float serenely along, drinking more beer. At this point you should have enough beer in you to “contribute to the storm surge,” if you know what I mean.
6. Empty your bladder up-current from that still-screaming guy from Quebec.
7. Thow your empty cans at, err, to him. Empty beer cans are nature's unsung floatation devices. Don't let him get too close though—he smells like piss.
8. Enjoy the ride while it lasts. Likes the French, storm surge always retreats eventually, and you'll be back on land soon enough.

Afterward

1. Climb off your cooler, hop out of the boat, and immediately start picking up full cans and bottles of beer left over from that convenience store down the street that washed away. 2. If he hasn't stopped screaming yet, an ice-cold beer should encourage “Frenchy” to settle down—especially if you catch him in the temple. 3. When he comes too, have him help pick up beers. If he refuses to work—which you should expect of socialists—simply hum a few bars of “Dueling Banjos.” 4. Deliverance needs no translation. 5. Have “Frenchy” drag your cooler back to your freshly scoured lot and then send him on his way. 6. Retrieve your rifle, radio, lawn chairs, and viennas from that waterproof bag you tied in a tree. 7. Pose for the CNN news crews that come by. They LOVE filming guys guarding nothing from lawn chairs. When Mama sees you on CNN, she and the kids will know you're “ah-ight.” 8. Have a can of viennas and a beer. 9. Wait for FEMA to come by. 10. Listen to the radio. According to the National Weather Service, you'll get to do it all again next week.

Shortell's Case Not About Academic Freedom

From the NY Sun:

A Brooklyn College professor who described religious people as "moral retards" said he is dropping his bid to become chairman of the department of sociology after the college's president expressed outrage over his views.

Timothy Shortell, an associate professor in the sociology department at the CUNY senior college, sent a bitter e-mail on Monday to several departmental heads saying he had decided to step down as chairman-elect and claiming he was a victim of a political attack.

…In his e-mail, Mr. Shortell expressed anger at the treatment he received from some members of his department and at what he called the administration's "inadequate" defense of his academic freedom.

"After witnessing the amount of venom directed at me by some members of the department during the last two weeks," he wrote, "I have come to doubt the possibility of any amicable solution."

As my father has been known to say, “You made that bed, now lie in it.”

Mr. Shortell engaged in a brutal, fact-challenged rant with little intellectual merit that vilified people of faith as uneducated fanatics and escapist liars that were incapable of moral action and prone to reveling in bigotry and violence. Interestingly enough, his essay was a perfect example of the kind of narrow-minded hatred and intolerance he ascribed to others.

Sadly, Professor Shortell seems to know as little about the limits of academic freedom as he does about the merits of religion.

The gold stand of academic freedom, the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, states:

A. Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.

B. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.
Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.

C. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

Let's look at these three principles as they apply to Professor Shortell's current situation.

A. Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.

Professor Shortell's essay was not the research and publication of academic findings, but a polemic. This principle clearly does not apply, as this essay was in no way an academic work.

B. Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.

Shortell's rant did not occur in a classroom setting, and was clearly a controversial essay targeting religion. Furthermore, depending upon the stated aims of CUNY Brooklyn College, Shortell quite possibly could have faced dismissal if he had introduced his essay in a classroom setting. This second principle of academic freedom emphatically does not apply to this case.

C. College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

Shortell would be within bounds in writing an essay or even an academic work condemning religion if he followed these guidelines, but the essay he created was neither accurate, nor exercising appropriate restraint, nor showing respect for the opinions of others. It flies explicitly in the face of the kind of work that would be protected by academic freedom.

Shortell can whine about the “inadequate” defense of his academic freedom all he wants, but academic freedom does not apply to his version of a sociological Mein Kampf. Academic freedom cannot shield people from their own stupidity, an lesson Mr. Shortell is now learning.

Furthermore, from a legal perspective, academic freedom in not a guaranteed right, but merely a quasi-legal concept. It is not precisely defined nor well-justified by legal principles. In short, it is merely empty rhetoric.

Much like the vile anti-religious holdings-forth of one Timothy Shortell.

Former ACLU Lawyer Reveals Their Hidden Agenda

"...The ACLU played a helpful role in the civil rights movement defending these people, and I can't turn my back on that. I have to give credit where credit is due."

"But....that being said, what they have done in the past is completely eviscerated by what they do in the present. The ACLU has become a fanatical anti-faith Taliban of American religious secularism."

Who said that? Mr. Reese Lloyd, former ACLU lawyer.

Read the rest of this fascinating and disturbing portrait of what the ACLU really hopes to accomplish at Stop The ACLU.

Take Back The Memorial

I look at the pictures again in my mind, and I cannot find the words, not matter how long and hard I try. A walk outside is meant to help me clear my head, and the sticky Carolina June night embraces me like a steambath. Fireflies and stars fill an ink-dark sky. I am not accustomed to this. My fingers shake with a chill that comes from inside, and a cold fire smolders within.

The images will not stop.

Freeze-frames of bodies cartwheeling down from upon high--what were they thinking in those last terrifying seconds, when they made that terrible choice between burning and hurtling themselves into space? They knew. They knew their lives were over, that they had been robbed of all their tomorrows, of everything they could have been, or have ever wanted to be.

They would never hold their children again, delighting in the wonder in their faces Christmas morning. They would never grow old and gray beside the one they loved; they would never delight in watching their grandchildren be born, crawl, laugh, and learn to run.

I close my eyes and put my head in my hands, and see the second plane barrel in, full of disbelief once more, and I shudder as the towers buckle and fall again in my mind. Tears well up and I choke back a sob. It is a side I show to no one, full of anger at my own impotence, and a shame I can neither understand nor explain.

And the anger grows, and I seek to channel it, hoping I can convey the wrongness of it all to those who would defile the hallowed ground where so many perished that bright blue September morning.

I hear the call.

Burlingame. Myers. Willis. Jarvis. Johnson.

I cannot believe some Americans are so shallow and so spiteful that they would slander the dead on hallowed ground. I cannot find the words to express my shock, anger and dismay.

Perhaps you can.

I rarely ask anything of my readers, but this is one of those times. Go to Take Back the Memorial and take advantage of the contact information provided there to let those who would murder the memory of the 9/11 dead that you will not stand for this treason to their memories. Please write. Please call. Be polite, be firm, make your will known.

Please, don't let another tragedy happen at Ground Zero.

Putting Kerry's Form 180 to Bed

According to the Boston Globe, John Kerry has finally authorized his military records to be released via a form 180:

On May 20, Kerry signed a document called Standard Form 180, authorizing the Navy to send an ''undeleted" copy of his ''complete military service record and medical record" to the Globe. Asked why he delayed signing the form for so long, Kerry said in a written response: ''The call for me to sign a 180 form came from the same partisan operatives who were lying about my record on a daily basis on the Web and in the right-wing media. Even though the media was discrediting them, they continued to lie. I felt strongly that we shouldn't kowtow to them and their attempts to drag their lies out."

Ignoring Kerry's rhetoric (as most Americans did in 2004), the important sentence in this story to me is not what was found by Globe reporter Michael Kranish (not much), but the interesting use of ellipses in the first sentence of the preceding paragraph:

On May 20, Kerry signed a document called Standard Form 180, authorizing the Navy to send an ''undeleted" copy of his ''complete military service record and medical record" to the Globe.

Why did Kranish feel a need to put "undeleted" and "complete military service record and medical record" in apostrophes? Was he unsure that he was getting a full and complete collection of documents as promised?

Kranish is sure to know that on the standard form 180 currently in use (h/t Blogs For Bush), Kerry would have had the option to release "undeleted" sections of his record for specific years or ranges of years, perhaps excluding years that may have contained information that may have raised troubling questions about Kerry's military service. At no point in the Globe article does Kranish mention specific dates of service (other than the December 2, 1968 Purple Heart incident) covered in the released documents, nor a date range, so this is impossible to verify.

To help clear this up, it would be very interesting to know if Globe reporter Kranish or any other staffer actually saw the form 180 submitted by Senator Kerry.

It would also be helpful if Kranish, who has been a bit too chummy with Kerry in the past for some people's comfort, would make a simple declaration that he did not find or withhold any information about Kerry's military record not already released to the public by the press.

Toward that end, I sent a simple email to the Globe ombudsman (ombud@globe.com) asking him to please pass along the following two questions to Mr. Kranish:

1. Did you (Mr. Kranish) or any other member of the Boston Globe see John Kerry's Form 180 before it was submitted to verify that he asked for a full and UNDELETED Report of Separation for his ENTIRE service record?

2. Did you (Mr. Kranish) or any other member of the Boston Globe
discover and/or withhold any new information from Senator Kerry's
military or medical records that were not previously released by John
Kerry or his staff regarding his military or medical service?

Quite frankly, I hope that Mr. Kranish can say for certain that he saw all of Senator Kerry's record, and that he found nothing substantial that the rest of us didn't already know.

I want to put this turkey to bed.

Note: Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus, Blogs for Bush, Michelle Malkin and Just One Minute are just some of the bloggers that have more coverage.

Update: Fixed a bad word choice, putting "apostrophes" in to replace and improper use of "ellipses." My readers are too smart for me to get away with blogging before my morning coffee...

Howard Dean: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Ku Klux Klan Rally, Montiplier, Vermont, 1927

"It's pretty much a white Christian Party" *

Howard Dean
Vermont Governor 1991-2003
Democratic National Committee Chair

Building Victory

Fallujah, Iraq – Critics of the attack on Fallujah last November often invoked the damning (and mythical) utterance from Vietnam: "We had to destroy the village to save it." Never mind that the alternative to the massive assault on the city backed by artillery, tanks, and aircraft would either be a huge loss of American lives or simply allowing the al-Qaeda cut-throat al-Zarqawi to keep it as the terrorist headquarters for all of Iraq. Forget that the city was already crumbling from the neglect of Saddam Hussein's regime. Today Fallujah is on the mend and then some, a symbol of renewal and American-Iraqi cooperation.

…Restoring and expanding access to electricity is top priority here, more so than access to running water because Iraqis pump water up from the mains to tanks on their roof. No electricity, no working pumps.
Williams and his counterpart at the Corp of Engineers, Maj. Daniel Hibner, don't have the simple goal of restoring pre-war Iraq. "The baseline is crappy so why go back to that?" says Williams. "We did do some damage but the repairs are taking these people far beyond where they were."

…"We're certainly not trying to turn this into the equivalent of an American city," says Williams. "But it will be first class for an Iraqi one and that's going to win the hearts and minds of the people." From the smiles, the thumbs up, the waves, and the cries of "Hello!" in Arabic I got from the children in even the worst parts of the city, I'd say they're being won.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds we get to see a perspective of the Iraqi War that the news media seems all too willing to ignore, that of an Iraq literally rising from the ashes of Saddam's neglect and al-Zarqawi's hatred. Terror will lose in Iraq. It has no choice, for while al Qaeda can threaten and kill, it can offer no hope and build no future.

More Koran Abuse Allegations

Dhimmiweek has just broken another story confirming Koran abuse by an American civilian contractor, now more than a year old.

Unlike the story of Guantanamo Bay guards that kicked or stepped upon the Koran, these allegations claim that this example of Koran abuse was far more severe, as the American contractor in this instance defiled the Koran with blood.

From OIC via Men's News Daily:

"...The OIC Spokesman urged the United States Government to live up to its responsibilities and not be lenient with the perpetrators of the desecration. He also demanded that those responsible for this despicable crime should be brought to justice immediately and that urgent measures should be taken to calm the tension in the Muslim world and ensure that such detestable acts are not repeated in the future."

Blogrunner Steal Bandwidth

blogrunner steal bandwidth. Hulk Smash!

Courtesy of the Ebb & Flow Institute, we learn of a site called blogrunner, which steals blog posts and then reposts them in their entirity. The site above seems to be a NY Times-affiliated subsite of Blogrunner. Their main site is here.

Blogrunner even hotlinks images instead of hosting their own copies of these images, forcing the original blogger to pay for additional bandwidth even though visitors may never see his site.

While I'm not a lawyer, I suspect this may not pass the "snift test" for acceptable use. At the very least, it is a huge breach of blog netiquette.

Any legal eagles care to comment on this one?

Hillary: Bush "Abusing Power."

From the NY Times via Matty D:

Senator Hillary Clinton castigated President Bush and Washington Republicans today as mad with power and bent on marginalizing Democrats during a speech to 1,000 supporters at her first major re-election fund-raiser, which netted about $250,000.

Mrs. Clinton, who is running for a second term in 2006 and is widely described as a possible Democratic nominee for the presidency in 2008, said that her party is hamstrung because Republicans dissemble and smear without shame and the news media has lost its investigatory zeal for exposing misdeeds.

Left unchallenged, especially if Democrats fail to pick up seats in next year's Congressional elections, she said, Republican leaders could ram through extremist conservative judges, wreck Social Security and make unacceptable concessions to China, Saudi Arabia and other nations that are needed to finance the United States budget deficit.

"There has never been an administration, I don't believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," Mrs. Clinton told the audience at a "Women for Hillary" gathering in Midtown Manhattan this morning.

"I know it's frustrating for many of you; it's frustrating for me: Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause and cheers. "I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."

Mrs. Clinton described Republican leaders as messianic in their beliefs, willing to manipulate facts and even "destroy" the Senate to gain political advantage over the Democratic minority. She also labeled the House of Representatives as "a dictatorship of the Republican leadership," where individual members are all but required to vote in lock-step with the majority's agenda.

Referring to Congress' Republican leadership, she said, "Some honestly believe they are motivated by the truth, they are motivated by a higher calling, they are motivated by, I guess, a direct line to the heavens."

Now Hillary, aren't you giving George and Company just a little bit too much credit?

After all, Howard Dean, Harry what's-his-name (from Searchlight NV, yes we know, we know...) and others have done far more to marginalize the Democratic Party than has Mr. Bush or Dark Sith Lord Rove.

Once could even say you're adding to the Demo-hysteria with the little ditty you uttered above.

As for:

"I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."

...Didn't that describe the last time you got near the White House?

Of course, the difference is this, Hill: This time, we aren't buying it.

Not by a long shot.

D-Day Plus 61 Years

Order of the Day June 6, 1944

"Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

"Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

"But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

"I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

"Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Supreme Allied Commander
Allied Expeditionary Force

61 years ago today, 156,000 allied troops from the United States, Grean Britain, Canada, Australia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Poland invaded Hitler's "Fortess Europe."

Approximately 10,000 allied soldiers became casualties on D-Day, with 2,500 killed. Between 4,000-9,000 Germans soldiers also became casualties on D-Day.

All told, the Battle of Normandy which began June 6, 1944 led to over 425,000 Allied and German troops killed, wounded, or missing.

Less than one year later, VE-Day--Victory In Europe-- was declared on May 9, 1945.

Please take a moment to remember the brave soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians on both sides that partipated in the liberation of Europe.

Links:
National D-Day Memorial (US)
D-Day Museum (UK)
National D-Day Museum Foundation (US)
American Experience| D-Day (US)
D-Day, Normandy, and Beyond
Normandy, 1944
Operation Overlord: The Invasion of Fortress Europe

Shocking Koran Update

It's JUST A FREAKING BOOK.

Isn't a little perspective refreshing?

Muslims Flush, Urinate On Koran at Gitmo

Detainees at Guantanamo Bay Cuba urinated on Korans and attempted to flush them down toilets.

Somehow, I doubt that will get much attention in the mainstream media, since they're only harmless terrorists committing these desecrations, not evil U.S. soldiers.

Michael Isikoff, where are you?

Shortell Proves His Ignorance With Eloquence

I once told a friend of mine that the only difference between the average person and one with a PhD is that the PhD may have the ability to express his stupidity more eloquently. Brooklyn College's Professor Timothy Shortell seems intent on proving the point.

Shortell is deep in controversy over online comments he made in an essay called “Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained”. The basic premise of Shortell's essay is that religion is irrational, inherently violent, creates immorality, and that the human condition will only improve with the eventual shunning of religion in favor of pleasure-seeking rationalism.

Shortell has just won an election to become the department chair of the Brooklyn College sociology department, but has not yet been confirmed to the position. Students began protesting Shortell's election as department chair once his essay became public, and now his chairman ship seems in doubt.

According to Fox News:

The school president must still approve the vote and has convened a committee to examine Shortell's qualifications. Members of the board of trustees at the publicly funded school are anxious to see the committee's report.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who is a member of the board of trustees, said, "He hasn't done anything within the classroom, at least as far we know and as yet that would amount to what might be called ... an impeachable offense."

Mr. Weisenfeld is correct.

The topic of the essay, while very controversial and confrontational, should not disqualify Professor Shortell from his duly elected chairmanship. Intellectual freedom to discuss controversial topics must be protected if higher education is to develop and encourage a new generation of thinkers.

The excretable quality of his essay, rife with contradictions in logic, unsupported accusations, and often unintentional comedy, is another matter entirely. If this essay's quality of writing is indicative of Shortell's academic prowess, I can only hope that the Brooklyn College facilities maintenance department has tenure-track positions.

Shortell's essay begins:

French Sociologist Émile Durkheim observed that religion was the root of science. Religion, he said, was the first human attempt to systematically explain the world. Durkheim thought that religious rationality would wither away in modern times (for him, the early twentieth century) because scientific rationality would replace it, by virtue of its superior explanatory power. Alas, he seems to have gotten this one wrong.

But Durkheim was right about the genealogy of thought. Modern religion is an elaboration of a belief in magic. In the absence of a scientific explanation of events and institutions, faith in magical powers, fetishization of nature, and overinterpretation of random variation are inevitable. Durkheim expected religion to fall out of fashion as the outright belief in magic had, for the same reason. For anyone with the least education, the superior power of scientific thinking is obvious. Only a willful ignorance could lead to any other conclusion.

Scientific thinking is indeed superior for many purposes, but it is smug arrogance to proclaim that a scientific approach is applicable to all situations. Someone should remind Shortell that Durkheim's revered scientific rationality was insufficient to deal with the emotional loss of his son in World War I. Durkheim withdrew within himself and could not even bear to have his son's name mentioned in his presence, a patently emotional, decidedly non-scientific response.

Professor Shortell further evangelizes:

Religions have persisted, despite their inability to explain the modern world. Here, in fact, we have a stunning reversal: religions play up the "essential mystery" of modern life. Since the world is too complex to understand all at once, in its entirety—even for the scientist—all of us will sometimes shake our heads in wonder at the turn of events in which we find ourselves. Many will find this uncertainty anxiety-provoking, and will look around for a convenient escape.

Once could presumably reverse the argument and also make the valid point that science still exists despite its inability to explain the modern world.

Despite research going back well past the time of Archimedes, mathematicians still cannot fully compute pi, the mathematical constant that is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. Should we not believe in mathematics or circles until pi is proven?

As social organizations, religions have a dramatic power that hides their essential irrationality. They persist today because they are so effective at constructing group identities and at setting up conflict between the in- and out-groups. For all religions, there is an "us" and a "them." All the ritual and the fellowship associated with religious practice is just a means of continually emphasizing group boundaries and hostility. It is no accident that the history of world religions is a history of violence, hatred and intolerance. The in-group has exclusive access to the truth, so the out-group need not—indeed, should not—be listened to; they can only deceive. And, being liars, and thus, evil, they forfeit their rights as equal members of the community. This is the poisonous logic of religious irrationality.

All modern religions are ideological: they insist on a total, though contradictory, system of beliefs and evaluations. Complete acceptance is the only way to escape the uncertainty of modernity. For this reason, religion without fanaticism is impossible. Anyone whose mind is trapped inside such a mental prison will be susceptible to extreme forms of behavior. All religions foment their own kind of holy war.

Shortell selectively targets religions as having a history of violence and intolerance, while ignoring that the greatest mass murderers of the past century were secularists. Stalin and Mao shared the good professor's dislike of religion, and Shortell seems unable to reconcile his cherry picking of the historical record with actual reality, and so proselytizes onward once more.

The reader might point out that some believers are more bland and mild than fire and brimstone. Those whose devotion is moderate are, perhaps, only cowardly fanatics. They want the fellowship and the security but ignore the logic of the system to which they grudgingly adhere. They may be more numerous than the overt fanatics, but they will always have less influence. This is simply the operation of the rule of the lowest common denominator; in response to uncertainty, the exaggerated sense of confidence of the zealot will win over the crowd. If you doubt that this is true, consider modern politics. The same dynamic applies. This is why our political system has given birth to the "war on drugs" and "family values."

Shortell preaches that anyone faithful to the tenets of their faith—no matter which faith—is a fanatic, while those who are less adamant in their religion are cowardly fanatics. Once again, Shortell shows a cultish divisiveness of his own, insisting that you must believe fully as he does or face being labeled an infidel.

One might also be amused to note that Shortell seems to be counting on his own zealotry to “win over the crowd” that he rails against.

Faith is by definition not rational—that is, it is belief in the absence of verification. (If you do not think this is a fair definition of faith, look it up. I got this from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, item 2b.)

Perhaps not surprisingly considering his track record thus far, Shortell "accurately misquotes" Merriam-Webster's item 2b, which defines faith as a “firm belief in something for which there is no proof .”

I find it every much as interesting that he chose that particular definition, as faith is also defined as an allegiance to duty or to a person, and also as loyalty, fidelity, and a sincerity of intentions.

Shortell seems against loyalty and suspicious of fidelity, and it isn't hard to see this in disturbing detail. In addition to the text of this essay, Shortell also includes a collection of original artwork he created.

In the majority of these pictures, we see the same solitary, dark, limbless human silhouette about to be crushed by elements of his environment.

In one image the figure is in the path of giant dominoes about to fall; in another, it sits helplessly in front of boulders careening down a hillside. Yet a third shows the torso about to be overrun by an oncoming pair of headlights. Shortell seems obsessed with stark loneliness, feelings of abandonment, helplessness, and impending death.

To put it mildly, he's got "issues.”

If every assertion were subject to question, the faithful would have to admit that they hold their beliefs without rational basis. If the public sphere were to promote the free contest of ideas, religious belief would wither under the scrutiny of scientific rationality, just as Durkheim expected. As with nationalism, faith is secured by appeals to emotion, not critical thinking. Emotion in crowds tends toward panic or violence.

While I'm sure the good professor finds it infuriating, the marketplace of ideas has been around for quite sometime, and scientific rationality seems to have done religion no harm. Faith isn't based on science, or pseudo-science, but upon a core human desire for something greater than this plane of existence, which is found in the vast majority of cultures in human history.

Shortell seems hell-bent on stripping us of humanity in a mad pursuit of cold objectivity. Perhaps he has spent a bit too much time imagining life as a Vulcan.

His comments about the tendency of crowds may or may not have a degree of merit, but I would think that if his theory is correct, then there should be bloodbaths during every NASCAR race, Broadway show, and PTA meeting. I remain unconvinced.

In order to be protected from the harsh light of rational argument, the faithful want to make religion a taboo subject. Orthodoxy is supposed to be beyond question. Just like in totalitarian states, where criticism of the government is a capital offense, the faithful would like to enforce an intellectual gag-order so that the barbarity of their regime goes unchallenged.

Professor Shortell does not desire a rational discourse. He dismisses the merits of religion out of hand. Nobody has censored him nor put him in prison for his views, but neither has he the courage to stand up for his accusations. He claims, "we should be able to debate the issue in the public sphere without fear of retribution," but refuses to debate. He hits and runs, making me suspect he does not desire the rational argument he claims, but instead simply wishes to stand alone on his soap box inside an echo chamber.

This only addresses roughly the first half of Shortell's essay, and the rest is as agonizingly tiresome. He bloviates on, making one unsubstantiated statement after another. Feel free to read the rest, but you won' t miss much other than more projections of Shortell's apparent insensitivity and insecurity.

His thesis is simply this, “Can there be any doubt that humanity would be better off without religion?”

I think we can answer quite honestly that, "Yes sir, after thousands of years finding comfort in religion in every corner of this world, and on others, there is obviously quite a bit of doubt."

Religions are well established worldwide, and the bulk of humanity seems to think we are better off with them as an intrinsic part of our collective social fabric. What is not so readily apparent is the value of Professor Shortell's relatively new cult of scientific rationality.

Crazy Cooter Comin' At Ya

I just happened to catch a CBS Evening News correspondent tonight (I released him unharmed hours later) and he revealed that many of the new suicide bombers in Iraq are far from being jihadis; they are simply unwitting citizens with car car woes.

Apparently a new insurgent tactic is to wait at car repair shops, and plant bombs in vehicles when civilians bring them in to get fixed.

Insurgents waiting for a victim...
here comes a good candidate.

By the time the customer comes back to pick up his car, it is not only fixed, it has "a little something special" under the hood. Customers drive away happy, only get a little more bang for their buck than they bargained for.

Coalition forces have released this picture of the suspected terrorist master bombmaker:

Master bomb-builder
Abdul "Cooter" al-Hassan

A suitable reward is being offered for Adbul "Cooter" al-Hassan's capture; 10,000 dinar and a date with Saudi Arabian "Am I Hot or Not?" Woman of the Year, Thamira Sittuna.

Amnesty Confrontational

One-time human rights organization Amnesty International is having a tough week.

A scathing attack on the U.S. administration's handling of enemy detainees in the War on Terror compared the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Stalin's “gulag” system of prison work camps. Amnesty International further strained their credibility by calling Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and other top administration officials "architects of torture," and suggested that other countries could file war-crime charges against the top officials and arrest them.

This kind of political grandstanding is expected from rouge regimes like North Korea or even the worst kind of partisan domestic politics, but it hardly befits an international human rights organization.

At the time these stories broke, I said that it was sad to see an organization such as AI lose so much of their credibility virtually overnight. I truly believe that. Generations of people have worked very hard for Amnesty International, trying with true sincerity to help the oppressed people of the world by placing a blinding public spotlight on the tyrannical regimes of the world.

Instead, because of what were quite frankly stupid comments by AI officers, the spotlight is now on Amnesty International, and the jagged cracks in its claimed impartiality have been exposed.

Publius Pundit has done a quantitative analysis showing that Amnesty specifically targets the United States for ridicule, releasing almost as much copy claiming U.S. human rights abuses as for all other nations combined.

Saudi Arabia, whose religious police forced girls to burn to death because of a sadistic adherence to radical Islam, deserves less scrutiny from AI than the United States?

Extending unwarranted rights is more deserving of Amnesty's limited resources than the ongoing genocide of tens of thousands of African Christians and Muslims by racist Arab militias in Darfur?

Unsubstantiated, often contradictory reports from imprisoned terrorists carry more weight with Amnesty than the anguished wails of those women and children, sons and daughters killed by al Qaeda bombs and bullets?

Amnesty International has no shame.... and it gets worse.

Amnesty claims:

AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect.

If Amnesty truly "does not support or oppose any government or political system" as they claim, then its leader would not have contributed the maximum amount possible to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Amnesty International seems to have decided to forego being a human rights organization and instead seems focused upon becoming another empty vessel for leftist propaganda.

The world is a sorrier place for the ideological betrayal of their leaders.

Note: Rusty shows the dunces at AI what a real gulag looks like.

Felt Sponges

“Grandpa, I Love You To Death... But I've Gots Bills To Pay” Was anyone else more than slightly creeped out by the Felt family's enthusiasm to cash in on their doddering 91-year-old grandfather's mysterious legacy as Deep Throat before he dies?

...Felt's daughter Joan, who persuaded her 91-year-old father to go public as "Deep Throat," lamented that the Post's Bob Woodward would get all the credit -- and profit--if Felt went to the grave with his secret.

"We could make at least enough money to pay some bills like the debt I've run up for the kids' education," she told Felt, according to the article. "Let's do it for the family."

Yes, you have to love a family that pimps out their pre-mortem grandpa.They might as well be humming some of Stephen Lynch's Grandfather

A stroke would be nice
Disease would be cool
I'll scatter his ashes
In my new swimming pool
I'll party with Hef
I'll dine with the Queen
So what say we unplug that machine?

Oh Grandfather, die
Before the fiscal year
Oh Grandfather, I
Wish Kevorkian were here
Oh Grandfather, die
Just take your final bow
Oh Grandfather, die
Family hates you anyhow...

Such behavior should be hardly surprising. Felt simply taught his kids to take the advice he gave to Bob Woodward as Deep Throat.

"Follow the money".

Footnotes

An excerpt of John Dean's comments regarding W. Mark Felt, who has recently come forward as the famed informant known for 33 years only as “Deep Throat.”

“I never thought he was in the loop to have the information," John Dean, counsel in Nixon's White House and the government's top informant in the Watergate investigation, told The Associated Press. "How in the world could Felt have done it alone?"

Dean said he couldn't see how Felt, then in charge of the FBI's day-to-day operations, could have had time to rendezvous with reporters in parking garages and leave clandestine messages to arrange meetings. Perhaps FBI agents helped him, Dean suggested.

I don't much care about whether Deep Throat was only W. Mark Felt, or a composite character Woodward and Bernstein made up of several sources. As I mentioned briefly in Ace's comments last night, a 33-year old story doesn't suddenly become newsworthy simply because a character's name changed. It would hardly matter if Lee Harvey Oswald's real name turned out to be Chippy the Wonder Squirrel; the historical record remains the same, only the footnotes change.

What really matters is that a free press (with help) was able to help rein in criminal behavior at the highest levels of American government. What matters is that in this nation, reporters don't have to fear a knock at the door in the middle of the night if they publish a story the government doesn't like. What matters is that Deep Throat, Woodward, and Bernstein were able to help depose a corrupt government using the truth, the law, and the press instead of a bloody coup. That is the legacy of Watergate.

All the rest is footnotes.

The Illinois House passed a

The Illinois House passed a bill Tuesday banning the sale of violent or sexually explicit video games to minors. The bill passed with an overwhelming 106-6 vote in favor of the ban. The bill now goes to Governor Rod Blogojevich, who proposed the ban last year after hearing of a game called JFK Reloaded which allows players to play the role of Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The bill passed the Illinois Senate earlier this month.

Other states and municipalities have tried similar bills, but they have repeatedly been struck down on First Amendment grounds. Under the impending law, clerks that knowingly sell adult video games to minors face a $1,000 fine, but the bill leaves it to the stores to determine which games are too violent or too sexually explicit for minors.

The proposed law has almost no chance of standing up to federal scrutiny. Not only does it place an undue burden upon stores to determine which games contain inappropriate content; it also fails to provide a significantly narrow definition of what constitutes violent or sexually explicit behavior, placing an undue burden upon store owners to make that determination without sufficient guidelines.

Two thoughts came to mind as I read of this proposed bill:

• That there are some similar problems between this bill and the practical failure of the “Assault Weapons Ban” embedded in the 1994 Crime Control and Prevention Act ( more commonly known as the “Assault Weapons Ban”) that expired last year, and;

• Illinois lawmakers must have known that this bill would not pass federal scrutiny based upon similar laws previously defeated… so why did they pass a bill that will almost certainly be challenged and struck down by federal courts once it becomes a law?

The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban signed into law by President Bill Clinton banned some specific firearms, but also attempted to ban similar weapons by banning certain features they felt were common to assault weapons. A partial list of these features included flash-hiders, pistol grips, and bayonet lugs.

The ban, while legal, was a practical failure. Firearm manufacturers simply removed the offending features and were then able to sell the exact same firearm type with only minor cosmetic changes.

It is a battle between the specific and the vague. The AW Ban failed because it tried to limit firearm access using specific but vague criteria, and the Illinois ban follows a similar path.

In the former, the 1994 Crime Bill was an attempt to get the desired result while ignoring the basic engineering truth that these firearm operating systems were identical to those of sporting guns. The lawmakers knew they could not pass a law that was a direct assault on the Second Amendment, and attempted a work-around that failed.

In the latter case , Illinois is attempting to get a desired result by while ignoring a basic truth that free speech, even speech we don't like, cannot be unreasonably constricted without just cause. They only compound their problems by unfairly placing an undue burden upon stores to determine what constitutes inappropriate content in an attempt to bypass the First Amendment.

So why are Illinois lawmakers so enthusiastically supporting a law that is destined to fail?

I have no easy answers, but suspect that it is a combination of some lawmakers trying to seriously address what they feel is a serious problem in our society, and others that calculated an immediate political gain from supporting such legislation with little or no political downside.

In any event, it will be interesting to see what Illinois lawmakers decide to once the law is signed and then almost certainly struck down. Will they go back to the proverbial drawing board and try to draft a constitutionally sound proposal, or will they simply throw their hands up and say, “we tried.”

Their response to a torpedoed law will go a long way towards telling us just how serious they really are.

Note: The bill that passed the House seems to be different that the version of the bill I discussed here in December.

Cheney's Estimation May Be Conservative

Vice President Dick Cheney made a prediction Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live" (transcript) that the Iraqi insurgency will end before the Bush administration leaves office in 2009.

"I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time," Cheney said. "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Critics of the Bush administration have been quick to point out that attacks by the insurgency have not declined since the Iraqi elections, and that the numbers of attacks have actually increased. While technically accurate, this criticism misses the larger context that seems to bolster Cheney's that the insurgency is in its "last throes."

The number and type of insurgent attacks have changed substantially since the conventional war ended just three weeks after the U.S.-led invasion began.

Early insurgent attacks were typically ambush attacks by groups of Saddam loyalists against coalition combat troops. These attacks often consisted of coordinated rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) supported by small arms (RPD, RPK machine guns, AK-type rifles) fire from fixed ambush positions. Despite the initial element of surprise enjoyed by the insurgents, the superior weapons, training, and tactics used by coalition combat forces typically reversed the ambushes, turning the insurgent's fixed ambush positions into funeral pyres. Superior armor and close air support assets decimated the insurgents, leading to many instances of the entire attacking force being captured, wounded, or killed.

Because of their decidedly lopsided defeats in early engagements against frontline coalition combat units, insurgents quickly changed their targets to "soft" targets, such as resupply convoys. While the insurgents were able to inflict more damage in their assaults on these more lightly armed and armored vehicles, the rapid response capability of coalition air and ground combat units once again led to high casualty rates among the insurgents during these attacks. (Note: These early insurgent attacks led to the widespread armoring and up-gunning of supply convoys).

In response to better coalition defense against these fixed-position attacks from both combat and combat support forces, insurgents once again tried to shift tactics, foregoing their near-suicidal fixed position engagements in favor of quick hit-and-run attacks that they hoped would increase their survivability, while also relying more heavily on the use of mines and IEDs.

Rapid response convoy escort units and UAV surveillance soon proved that insurgents fleeing the scene of ambushes in vehicles were just as vulnerable to coalition counterstrikes as they were in previous attacks from fixed positions. As the coalition forces became more and more adept at countering and often reversing most forms of enemy ambushes, force-on-force ambushes have largely gone away, and the insurgents have reverted to the use of mines, IEDs, and vehicles driven by suicide bombers.

While these IED and mine attacks in particular still continue to inflict casualties on coalition forces on a nearly daily basis, tactics and platforms are being developed to neutralize IEDs and mines. Coalition soldiers can and will continue to die as a result of these insurgent attacks, but these usually isolated attacks have little chance of viable long term tactical or strategic success.

As a result of their near complete failure to significantly impact the goals of coalition forces on either the strategic or tactical levels without sustaining heavy casualties of their own, the secular pro-Saddam elements of the insurgency are becoming marginalized and reticent to fight.

The insurgency that remains is now a force increasingly made up of non-Iraqi Arab Islamist fighters as the (largely Sunni) natives that made up the core of Iraqi insurgents seems to be less inclined to fight as the war continues without a weakening of coalition and Iraqi resolve.

These foreign fighters have united behind an al Qaeda terrorist leader named al-Zarqawi, and have in the past two years shifted their tactics several times, and each tactical decision has compounded the threat to their position. It is precisely because of these shifts that Vice President Cheney's prediction of the end of the Iraqi insurgency by 2009 is not only probable, but a conservative estimate of the actual timetable.

It is quite likely that any widespread insurgency in Iraq will fall apart well before the end of the Bush administration. It is possible that the insurgency will collapse by early 2007, and it could conceivably devolve from its current level of operations into local, cell-level operations with little or no widespread planning and coordination capabilities by as early as late 2005.

When this occurs, the disintegration of the insurgency will come as a shock to many, but it should really come as hardly a surprise at all.

The insurgency learned early on that it could not fight even a semi-conventional war against even the most fragile elements of coalition military forces. Once it became apparent through the elections of John Howard in Australia and George Bush in America that coalition nations would not capitulate to the anti-involvement Left's desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the insurgency turned upon the Iraqi people and its government as their only remaining soft targets.

When the insurgents began attacking Iraqi targets, any slight chance they had of winning a stalemate (their only real hope) turned to ash. When al-Zarqawi's loyalists began assassinating political and community leaders, murdering police officers, and detonating car bombs in crowds of civilians, they not only lost and credibility they had had with the Iraqi people, they steeled Iraqi resolve.

The al-Zarqawi-mandated attacks against polling places before and during Iraq's January elections proved that al-Zarqawi and his supporters were anything but freedom fighters; they were enemy of the Iraqi people. They were not insurgents or Michael Moore's minutemen. They were--and are--terrorists.

Any lingering sympathy for the terrorists evaporated with the recent spate of suicide bombings in April and the al-Zarqawi announcement that the killing of Iraqi civilians was justified, as al-Zarqawi considers them "collaborators" under his radical fundamentalist version of Islam.

Because of the actions of al-Zarqawi and his followers, few Iraqis are willing to suddenly join a terror organization that may call upon them to murder their families, neighbors, and friends. It is becoming increasingly apparent to even the most disenchanted Sunni Baathists that the terrorists are far more of a threat to them than are coalition forces or the newly-formed Iraqi government.

The terrorists will lose the war in Iraq; it is simply a matter of when they will lose. Vice President Cheney predicts by 2009. Based upon al-Zarqawi's ability to galvanize Iraqi opinion against the insurgency, it may be far sooner than that.