Hurricane Survival Guide

Hurricane Season 2005 is far from over folks, and at least one meteorologist expects that the remaining storms this season will begin working their way from the Gulf States towards the East Coast. Forewarned is forearmed.

WARNING: This is not comprehensive hurricane survival guide. I've only been through a few, and hardly consider myself an expert. Anyone who claims to be able to tell you everything you need to do to survive in every situation is lying. Adjust accordingly to your circumstances, but remember the only way to beat a hurricane is to not be there when it arrives.

Before the Storm: General

• Listen to the radio, watch television news, or read online news sources to keep abreast of developing tropical systems. Keep close track of storms that may head in your general direction. Don't be caught flat-footed.
  
• Know the hurricane evacuation routes for your area. By a state map or better yet, an atlas that can provide you with parallel routes away from an impending storm.
  
• Make sure any vital medical prescriptions are filled in advance of an impending storm.
  
• Make hotel reservations several days in advance "just in case." Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.
  

Before the Storm: Around the House

• Secure any outside objects. Bikes, toys, plants and other outdoor items can be carried away by wind and water, often at unpleasant velocities.
  
• Board up your windows if possible, or tape them with duct tape in an asterisk pattern (*) if that is your only option. This serves to reinforce the glass.
  

Before the Storm: Transportation

• Fill your gas tank several days in advance, and keep it topped off.
  
• Check your vehicle's fluids, and belts, making sure to top off your windshield washer fluid and coolants.
  
• Make sure your tires are in good shape, and make sure your spare tire is inflated.
  
• Make sure your tires have adequate tread. See manufacturers guidelines.
  

Before the Storm: Personal

• Create a "bug-out bag."
  
  This is an emergency evacuation bag of bare essentials you make need in an emergency. In this bag (preferably a backpack) include:
  
  1. a small battery-operated AM/FM radio. fresh batteries for same.
     
  2. two waterproof flashlights and/or battery operated lanterns. fresh batteries for same.
     
  3. cell phone (and charger).
     
  4. disposable lighter and waterproof matches.
     
  5. personal toiletries including toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, hand sanitizer, and other personal hygiene products as applicable.
     
  6. a first aid kit with painkillers, bandages and band aids.
     
  7. duct tape (min. 2 rolls)
     
  8. sturdy pocket knife
     
  9. hammer & prybar
     
  10. box of 8D nails
      
  11. blankets (multiple)
      
  12. clothes
      
  13. socks
      
  14. raingear
      
  15. boots
      
  16. enough non-perishable, ready-to-eat food and water (1 gallon per person per day) for three days.
      
  17. last but not least, all insurance information, property, vehicle, life, and medical.
      
  
  
• create a contacts list. Include a I.C.E. "in case of emergency" number.
  
• put an I.C.E. notification with your ID and store it in your cell phone.
  

Before the Storm: Evacuation

• pack bug-out bag, and supplies including food and water into vehicle.
  
• make one last check to make sure outdoor items are secured.
  
• cut off all electrical switches, appliances, televisions, lights, etc.
  
• before you leave contact your I.C.E. person and let them know where you are going.
  
• make sure all windows are closed tightly and locked.
  
• lock all doors.
  
• leave.
  
• anticipate high winds and driving rain. Stay calm, drive slowly. Allow plenty of time to arrive at your destination. Beware of standing water.
  
• Call your I.C.E. contact when you arrive safely.
  

During the Storm
Moving away from the hurricane will most likely reduce the effects of a hurricane, but it cannot eliminate risks entirely, even hundred of miles inland.

• Duct tape windows in asterisk or "star" pattern (*). stay away from windows. draw blinds and curtains, if possible, to contain glass in the event of a break.
  
• stay inside, away from windows and doors especially during the eye of the storm. winds restart again quickly with extreme velocities as the eyes passes and the wind shifts 180 degrees.
  
• stay near interior walls. If the winds are very strong move into an interior bathroom where the building is likely to be strongest.
  
• do not leave unless flooding is imminent or you are instructed to do so by authorities.
  

After the Storm

• stay off the road and away from affected areas until authorities clear the area for your return.
  
• watch for downed power lines and other debris in roads.
  
• be very careful of standing pools of water and especially flowing water.
  
• watch for displaced wildlife. poisonous snakes, fireants, and abandoned pets. all can present hazards.
  
• watch for dangerous debris (wear boots).
  
• lookout for injured people and animals. Call authorities if possible.
  
• do not become a tourist. go home, and stay home.
  
• secure your property. take stock of any damage. Catalog for insurance purposes.
  

Again, this list is hardly comprehensive, and cannot anticipate special needs or unexpected situations such as those extraordinary circumstances currently facing those that have been hit by Hurricane Katrina. It is however, a start.

Helping Katrina's Victims: Samaritan's Purse

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is asking bloggers to contribute to a list of relief organizations he's compiling so that we can help out those affected by Katrina. It is great to see that Glenn and other top-flight bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, the Volokh Conspiracy, the Truth Laid Bear, and many, many more are doing their part to help those impacted by this horrific storm and its aftermath.

My humble submission to Glenn's list is Samaritan's Purse. Samaritan's Purse is a Christian relief organization run by Franklin Graham, son of legendary minister Bill Graham.

They already have trucks rolling south, and have two disaster relief teams in Alabama. They will base in Mobile, Alabama and will work their way toward the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts, coordinating thousands of volunteers from local churches to rehabilitate as many homes as possible.

They also accept employer matching funds.

Help them help the victims if you can. Samaritan's Purse not only helps rebuild buildings, they help rebuild faith.

AK-47s in the Hands of N.O. Looters? Not Likely

Let's go ahead and nip this one in the bud.

Shepard Smith is on Fox News right now telling us that looters are roaming the streets of New Orleans armed with AK-47s. Let's nip this rumour in the bud right now.

This is an AK-47. An AK-47 is a fully-automatic weapon that has a rate of fire of 600 rounds/minute. It is highly regulated under federal law, and almost impossible to obtain in the United States without extremely restrictive background checks and full registration.

This is a WASR-10. A WASR-10 is a semi-automatic rifle that has a rate of fire restricted by how fast the shooter can pull the trigger, effectively 60-100 rounds/minute. It is one of a thousand AK-47 look-a-likes available in the United States, but it is not a machine gun.

Hey, aren't these the same picture? How can you tell the two apart?

My point exactly. The fact of the matter is that untrained people, and this includes most police officers, and almost all journalists, cannot tell the two apart even, when close enough to touch them.

Don't let the media hysteria make this event any worse than it already is. They've done enough of that already.

Update: Bill O'Reilly is spreading the same ignorance.

Lambs Leading Wolves

Via WBRZ-TV:

Some 5,300 inmates in Orleans Parish Prison are awaiting evacuation, according to Pam Laborde, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Dept. of Corrections. About 1,200 OPP inmates have been evacuated to Hunt Correctional Center, the staging area to send inmates out to other facilities.

Correctional officers are on the scene in New Orleans and all inmates are being chaperoned. Laborde said no inmates have escaped to their knowledge.

As of 3 a.m., all inmates in Jefferson Parish were evacuated. St. Bernard Parish inmates were evacuated before the storm.

The decision to move the inmates was made after there was no electricity, water, etc. The inmates are afraid and hungry, but were somewhat relieved when told that the situation would approve, according to Laborde.

On the bright side: It looks like yesterday's erroneous ABC News report about prisoners taking hostages reported here was wrong. I don't blame ABC for having bad information, though; it's hard to easily get corroborating information under such circumstances.

On the down side: Authorities have done absolutely nothing to prevent a prisoner riot, and as conditions continue to deteriorate, it may well yet happen.

Church groups are now tasked with transporting starving, frightened, and desperate felons of Orleans Parish Prison. The lambs are leading the wolves.

Update: According to Lisa Carton of Fox News, New Orleans officials are unable to handle prisoners and have let them go to fend for themselves.

Pumps for Punks

Not real sure about the context of this pic I Googled (from somewhere here), but the time has come for New Orleans and other areas overwhelmed by looters.

This New Orleans cop seems to be taking that consideration under advisement. A 12-gauge seems to be about the only law in the Big Easy right now.

I wonder if Remington offers a "Looter Special."

Hurricane Blame

Just because is a 600-mile wide natural disaster that's been happening for eons without human internvention, their's no reason we can't blame hurricanes on the neo-cons.

The Germans think you can lay the blame on Bush. Maybe they'll only fire up one oven this time.

Blogs for Bush catches some more Bush-bashing at NRO. I'm sure Americablog will find a way to "out" another gay Republican and place the blame on him.

DUmmies are celebrating the demise of Trent Lott's house.

And when there is something stupid to be said, there is always a Kennedy around.

Now we're just waiting to hear Cindy Sheehan explain that we shouldn't mount a rescue effort, because saving brown-skinned peoples (including those in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama) aren't worth risking the lives of "even one more soldier." The media, of course, will edit her comment down to blame Bush for global warming.

And the band played on...

What New Orleans Should Learn From Diamond City

Jeff Jarvis asks:

It's an indelicate question but one that needs to be asked: Should New Orleans be rebuilt? Or how much of it should be?

We've done similar work after eerily similar events here in North Carolina, though on a smaller scale. If they do decide to rebuild a city the size of New Orleans, it would take decades, and tens of billions of dollars that could once again be undone in a single storm.

To paraphrase, rebuilding the same city in the same spot and expecting a different result is the definition of what? We got it right with Diamond City 103 years ago. Sounds minds would follow suit.

Goodbye, Big Easy. It was fun while it lasted.

Hurricane Katrina Relief

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is organizing a list of links and contact numbers for aid and relief organizations. GO THERE NOW. Do what you can.

Orleans Prison Riot

48 hours ago, reporters asked New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin what he intended to do about prisoners in the Orleans Parish Prison. He ignored the reporter, and apparently ignored the incarcerated. The inmates didn't appreciate it.

Via ABC News:

Inmates at a prison in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans have rioted, attempted to escape and are now holding hostages, a prison commissioner told ABC News affiliate WBRZ in Baton Rouge, La.

Orleans Parish Prison Commissioner Oliver Thomas reported the incident to WBRZ.

A deputy at Orleans Parish Prison, his wife and their four children have been taken hostage by rioting prisoners after riding out Hurricane Katrina inside the jail building, according to WBRZ.

The estimated rioting prisoners and their hostages are approximately one mile northwest of the Louisiana Superdome where thousands of civilians are awaiting evacuations.

(Via Yahoo Maps and a little graphics work)

I hope the National Guard troops coordinating the evacuation of the Superdome are armed, or this could get even uglier than it already is.

Update: Michelle Malkin is all over this before I could even get this posted. She's that good.

9/2/05 Update: Prison Riot was bogus, but now it appears the convicts got out before the children, the elderly, and the ill. See here for more.

Lights, Camera...

(picture swiped from Protein Wisdom, who swiped it from NRO)

Media What?

Political Football

No matter how sincerely you mean it, chanting "Bu$Hitler ChimpHalliburton lied, Fascist babykillers died!" grows tiresome after a while, and even the most ardent America-haters need a break.

Here, Cindy Sheehan signals yet another safety in a pickup football game that pitted "skirts vs. skinheads." One team decided to surrender forfeit after the coin toss, the other team refused and ran up a score of 144-0 in the first half before getting bored and beating up the cheerleaders.

I'll let you guess which team won.

Welcome to the Rhineland, Cindy

Did you know that the vast majority of American military mothers who have the gall to support their sons are fascists?

But don't believe me, read it yourself.

I finally figured out George Bush's NEW reason for staying in Iraq. This reason has also been co-opted by the Move America Forward (forward to what: Fascism?) and the poor mothers who would be honored if their sons were killed in George Bush's war for greed and power.

So if you don't agree with Cindy Sheehan's call to abandon the 25 million people of Afghanistan, or the 25 million people of Iraq, you are a fascist.

If you you don't agree that America is "a cancer," you are a fascist.

If you don't believe that Iraqis were better off when Saddam was in power and the mass graves and rape rooms were open, you are a fascist.

If you think that America still has a Constitution, you are a fascist.

If you think that elementary school teachers should not be forcibly drafted into combat, you are a fascist.

Well guess what, Cindy? The vast majority of Americans disagree with you on most if not all of these points.

Cindy, as someone with Nazis protesting side-by-side with you in Crawford, against our government and very Constitution, you've got a lot of nerve calling others "fascists."

Goodbye, Big Easy

From meteorologist Jeff Master's blog at the Weather Underground:

The track forecast has not changed significantly, and the area from New Orleans to the Mississippi-Louisiana border is going to get a catastrophic blow. I put the odds of New Orleans getting its levees breached and the city submerged at about 70%. This scenario, which has been discussed extensively in literature I have read, could result in a death toll in the thousands, since many people will be unable or unwilling to get out of the city. I recommend that if you are trapped in New Orleans tomorrow, that you wear a life jacket and a helmet if you have them. High rise buildings may offer good refuge, but Katrina has the potential to knock down a high-rise building. A 25 foot storm surge and 30 - 40 foot high battering waves on top of that may be able to bring down a steel-reinforced high rise building. I don't believe a high rise building taller than six stories has ever been brought down by a hurricane, so this may not happen Monday, either. We are definitely in unknown waters with Katrina.

Hurricane force winds are now striking Louisiana. Katrina is 105 miles south southeast of New Orleans, and landfall is expected early Monday morning. Computer models suggest that more than 80 percent of buildings would be badly damaged or destroyed, he said.

God be with all of you within reach of Katrina's grasp, because you are beyond human help now.

The Cindy Sheehan Anthology

Instapundit points out a Dave Kopel column in the Rocky Mountain News that the national news media at large just doesn't seem to want to help Cindy Sheehan get her message out. Perhaps I can do my part to help with a compilation of Cindy Sheehan's greatest hits.

"Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by a George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11."
source

CHRIS MATTHEWS: All right. If your son had been killed in Afghanistan, would you have a different feeling?

CINDY SHEEHAN: I don't think so, Chris, because I believe that Afghanistan is almost the same thing. We're fighting terrorism. Or terrorists, we're saying. But they're not contained in a country. This is an ideology and not an enemy. And we know that Iraq, Iraq had no terrorism. They were no threat to the United States of America.

source

"You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don't tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.

Cuz, we're not freer. You're taking away our freedoms. The Iraqi people aren't freer, they're much worse off than before you meddled in their country.

You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine."

source

When I was growing up, it was Communists'. Now it's Terrorists'. So you always have to have somebody to fight and be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, guns, and bullets and everything.

But I do see hope. I see hope in this country. 58% of the American public are with us. We're preaching to the choir, but the choir's not singing, if all of the 58% started singing, this war would end.

I got an email the other day and it said, "Cindy, if you didn't use so much profanity there's people on the fence' that get offended"

And you know what I said? "You know what? You know what, god-damn-it? How, in the world is anybody still sitting on that fence'?"

"If you fall on the side that is pro-George, and pro-war, you get your ass over to Iraq, and take the place of somebody who wants to come home. And if you fall on the side that is against this war and against George Bush, stand up and speak out."

source

Mrs Sheehan says that the stress of the death had already led the couple, who were high school sweethearts, to separate. She admits that he does not agree with the "level of intensity" she has devoted to peace in the past year.

She has had to dissuade her younger son, Andy, from joining the Army. "I said there was no way this Government was going to get another of my children."


source

We have no Constitution. We're the only country with no checks and balances. We want our country back if we have to impeach George Bush down to the person who picks up the dog sh-t in Washington! Let George Bush send his two little party animals to die in Iraq. It's OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons but we are waging nuclear war in Iraq, we have contaminated the entire country. It's not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. Hypocrites! But Israel can occupy Palestine? Stop the slaughter!
source

“We're not letting them intimidate us. If we get killed out here, know that the Secret Service killed us.”
source

These are hardly all of Cindy's greatest hits (Kopel has more), but it seems quit... interesting that CNN, CBS, the New York Times and other news outlets can't seem to find any of Cindy's real feelings.

Perhaps these feelings aren't convenient for their agenda. But they don't have an agenda... right?

Hurricane Katrina's Harsh Sentence

As of 10:50 AM eastern time, Hurricane Katrina has just be upgraded again, with sustained wind speeds of 175 MPH. Of Atlantic hurricanes, only Hurricane Camille (1969) and Hurricane Allen (1980) have higher confirmed wind speeds in the 190 MPH range.

Citizens of New Orleans have been ordered out in a mandatory evacuation, but interestingly enough, a "captive audience" doesn't seem to be factored into evacuation plan, or if they have, the mayor is not talking about them publicly.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered an immediate mandatory evacuation Sunday for all 485,000 citizens, during a press conference just broadcast on CNN, but ignored repeated questions asking whether or not they intend to evacuate prisons in the area.

This is significant: as of 2000, that state of Louisiana:

...locks up more men, women, and children than anybody else in the United States. And in a ranking of U.S. jails by an average daily population, OPP came in at No. 9.

While current data is hard to come by the situtation for Orleans Parish Prison is likely similar to this from five years ago:

...the average daily population at OPP -- 6,381 inmates -- is much lower than its booking rate. Most of his inmates are either going to or coming from a court date at Orleans Parish District Criminal Court, says Foti. He also holds 50 juveniles. The rest are people that OPP is being paid for: a few hundred federal prisoners and 2,700 Louisiana state inmates sleeping in parish prison beds until space becomes available in the state system.

Police and fire assets are dedicated to moving a half million people, including 100,000 that rely on public transportation, There may not be enough law enforcement officers available to move the prison population, and if they can be moved, it remains to be seen where they could be moved.

I sincerely hope that Mayor Nagin is just keeping prisoner transfers quiet. I fear, however, that he has been caught flat-footed, and that hundreds or thousands of prisoners may have to ride out an extremely powerful hurricane from behind bars.

8/30/05 Update: CBS News just reported that Orleans Parish Prison was forced into an emergency evacuation this afternoon as the prison was rapidly filling with water.

KATC has more on the evacuation. Nice job, guys. It only took you 48 hours to get on this. We're damn lucky you're not reporting about 4,000 water-logged corpses.

9/2/05 Update: Prison Riot was bogus, but now it appears the convicts got out before the children, the elderly, and the ill. See here for more.

Iraqi Draft Constitution Signed

Via CNN:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The Iraqi constitutional committee signed off on a draft of a constitution Sunday after making some minor amendments, a committee spokesman said.

The draft, which was signed by the committee, will now go to the National Assembly. The amendments were made in hopes of appeasing the Sunni Arab minority, although government spokesman Leith Kubba said not all Sunnis agreed.

Hardline Sunnis still object to what they consider two key sticking points; federalism and the formal dissolution of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Shiites and Kurds came up with a compromise delaying any action on these issues until a new assembly--essentially the future government--convenes in December.

But what does all this mean?
A couple of things:

1. It proves that the Iraqi people understand the concept of a representative democracy, even the Sunni population from which the insurgency has evolved. Six of seven known insurgency groups have pledged to vote rather than fight in the October vote


2. It proves that the three main groups understand compromise. While no arrangement will satisfy all parties, the majority of people seem to accept the constitution in its current form. The question remains whether that majority is "enough." Despite media oversimplification, the Sunni and Shia voting blocks have already proven not to be monoliths, and may sway the outcome of the constitutional referendum scheduled to be held October 15.


3. If this constitutional draft is defeated in October, the process isn't over. New elections will be held and a new draft constitution will be hammered out. You must remember that it took us over a decade for the 13 colonies to hammer out the United States Constitution and we still had to develop a separate Bill of Rights that we still see a need to amend occasionally.

As important to many Americans, the ratification of the process will not directly impact the training of Iraqi military and police forces that will one day take over Iraq's security needs. It is hoped that Sunni by-in on the constitutional draft and a ratification of this draft might undercut support for the insurgency and hasten the United States withdrawal, but that was primarily a political concern, not a practical one. Iraqi forces will take over their country's security when they are ready for the job, not when insurgent attacks decrease.

Personally, I would not be completely disappointed if this draft of the constitution is not ratified. I'm not sold on the merits of federalism, and would like to see the dissolution of the Baath Party as a formal part of the document.

In any event, I don't have to live with it. Iraqis do. We'll discover their feeling in October.

Contact Me ASAP

Letters, we get letters...

Al salaam, My name is Haja mashed from Brunei I am a 23 years old and a british citizen who was taken to Brunei by my father 10 years ago. He deceived me that I was going there on vacation and later married me out to a wealthy Prince in Brunei who is 30 years older than me. I was thus forced into marriage and when I objected I was beaten and raped by this Prince. I was locked up in a house for six months after which I submitted and decided to accept my faith, knowing that was the only way out. After I got my freedom back I have been allowed by my husband to have access to his account and businesses.

With the help of a loyal aide I have been able to divert $4.500.000.00 (four million five hundred thousand dollars)as bonds into a private finance house without his knowledge. Right now I have mapped out a plan of escape out of Brunei,thou I have tried escaping several times and its been fruitless. first of all I have been able to move the fund out of Brunei. This is where I need your assistance,to help me secure the fund from the finance house before I get out of Brunei if I am lucky enough. If you know you are capable of handling such a huge amount of money respond to me and I will compensate you by giving you $1.000.000.00 (one million dollars) of the total fund
Note also that you must keep this transaction secret as my life is at stake if my husband or any of his relatives hear of this transaction they will stone me to death or hang me. Please reply me here :

[Address witheld for her safety-- Ed.]

Yours faithfully,
Haja mashed

Alas, I am unable to help poor Haja. Perhaps you can, dear reader.

Simply prove your truthworthiness by depositing $500,000 in either the PayPal or Amazon Honor System accounts located in column to the right.

I know you'll do the right thing.

Note: I see that I'm not the only one getting letters from the Middle East this weekend. Go check out the letter to Rusty at the Jawa Report.

A New Approach?

(Image via AP)

With her conventional anti-Bush protests failing thus far in Crawford, Cindy Sheehan pledges to "Watusi" untli she is granted another meeting with the President.

Cindy Sheehan's Neo-Nazi Friends

Via WND:

Members of Stormfront.org are tossing their figurative hoods into the mix, as they invite supporters to come to Camp Casey to "let the world know that white patriots were first and loudest to protest this war for Israel."

...

"We want to challenge these leftists with the fact that their leftist leaders, like Hillary Clinton, are on the same war-for-Israel team as the cowardly Republicans who have been bought and paid for in the Senate, House, White House and media by the Jewish Neocon political machine."

These of course, are be the same evil neo-cons that Cindy Sheehan so eloquently wrote of here.

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by a George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11.

Obviously, Cindy Sheehan and the neo-Nazis of Stormfront are on the same page.

Sorry, Abu: Your Travel Agent Has Been Cancelled

Jihad Tours is going to have to fnd a new way to travel. Via CENTCOM:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Coalition forces killed Abu Khallad, a major facilitator of foreign fighters and suicide bombers into northern Iraq, during operations in Mosul on Aug. 25. Multiple intelligence sources and tips from concerned citizens led multi-national forces to a location in Mosul where known foreign fighter facilitator Khallad, a Saudi national, was located. Upon arrival at that location, multi-national forces stopped his vehicle, a gunfight immediately ensued, and Khallad and an unidentified terrorist were shot and killed.

"Multiple intelligence sources and tips from concerned citizens" were responsible for taking out a top terrorist. Cool.

Arab News: End the Debacle Ms. Sheehan

From Arab News:

Many columnists around the country have “tip-toed” around the Sheehan controversy because they have respected the loss of her son. But now Ms. Sheehan is showing her true colors: Liberal activist, not loving mother. I think it is time to fight back.

Ms. Sheehan and other appeasers around the world provide the fuel that feeds the fire of terrorism. If not for this fuel, terrorists would realize that they do not have a chance to sway the minds of people and would end the bombing. Terrorists are not stupid, they understand that bombing innocent civilians will not change the minds of the strong, but will break the will of the weak. So they attack the weak and the weak fold.

Spain is a good example of this reasoning. Would the terrorists have attacked Spain if the whole population stood strong against terrorism? No. What would be the point?

Every time an appeaser voices his or her opinion against the war in Iraq terrorists gain hope that they can change the will of the people. So whether they want to admit it or not, appeasers protesting the war in Iraq are indirectly responsible for the death of the innocent. And the death of our soldiers.

In fact appeasers are directly responsible for the death of Ms. Sheehan's son, not George W. Bush. If the whole country was united for the war in Iraq, I doubt if the terrorists would have started their suicide bombing campaign.

Using this logic Ms. Sheehan has become the biggest terrorist in the world...

This is from a Louisiana, USA-based Pravda columnist in the Arab News, a Saudi-based paper distributed in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Near East, North Africa, Europe and USA.

Does this qualify as a U.N. sanction?

The Silver Lining

From comments on Iraq the Model:

The Silver Lining

The process of tearing down centuries of animosity between different factions in the ME has started. This process will play itself out of the years ahead of us.

America and her allies and the people of Iraq should take credit for taking people from all factions and having them sit down together, stepping back and encouraging them to debate, negotiate face to face.

It is a very noble process that requires patience and most importantly, encouragement to all parties from the rest of the world.

'Nuff said.

Hey Cindy: Bugger Off

Cindy Sheehan's Magical Move-On.org Mystery Bus Tour has apparently decided to target House Majority Leader Tom DeLay as the first stop on her "Blame America" tour.

I have no love for DeLay, but I think I just fell in love with his spokeswoman Shannon Flaherty, a little, becuase she said DeLay would not meet with Sheehan on the grounds that:

"Mr. DeLay disagrees with those who believe we should give the terrorists the timeline they want and simply cut and run from the war in Iraq."

Amen, sister.

Cindy Sheehan: All About the Benjamins

Grief pays, and it pays well.

Cindy Sheehan's anti-war, anti-American, Anti-Bush "Sheehanhadeen" movement has raked in over $170,000 from contributors in just the past few weeks, as public relations experts Fenton Communications carefully choreograph Cindy's scheduled daily cry in front of a wooden cross with her son's name on it.

That cash goes a long way when left-wing corporate sponsors such as True Majority (a non-profit PAC of Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry's fame) pick up the tab for almost everything. Berkeley-based radicals from Moveon.org (who claimed of the Democratic Party in December, that "we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.") and Howard Dean's Democracy for America are also involved.

The anti-war activists in Crawford love to say that those supporting the troops and the President are merely corporate shills, yet big money contributions from the left pay for everything from catering to marketing professionals for the Cindy Sheehan's "one woman crusade."

All she currently lacks are official corporate sponsor patches on uniforms like those worn by NASCAR teams, and one day they very well may, if Sheehan's supporters ever hear of the sport.

I've even got her perfect primary sponsor already picked out, complete with an appropriate product to pitch. Hopefully, she can see clear to steer a few dollars from George Soros my way for the effort.

As long as she can keep the camera's scheduled for her tears, she'll continue to have money to burn.

Welcome to the Circus; I Hope You Enjoy the Show

This image from a story in the Dallas-Forth Worth Star-Telegram kind of sums the whole thing up, doesn't it?

Two stage-managed anti-war protestors. Dozens of people standing behind them that seem to be made up primarily of spectators and newspeople, gazing upon them like animals in the zoo.

Pro-American protestor Gregg Garvey of Keystone, Fla., whose son Justin was killed in Iraq, may have described the fawning media attention of "Mother Sheehan" best:

"I just want to know whether they're going to crown her the homecoming queen."

Indeed. Perhap he should ask the caterers.

Be sure not to miss the road show when they go on tour.

Re-Repost: Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season

As Katrina has made landfall and left a million Floridians without power, it seemed like a perfect time for a re-repost of this post.

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.

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.

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.

Sheehan Builds Bi-Partisan Support

She's got convicted terrorist supporter Lynne Stewart, Code Pink, Castro-loving United for Peace and Justice pulling for her on the far, far left.

She's got former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon David Duke and the neo-Nazis of Stormfront backing her on the far, far right.

Say what you want about the "Friends of Cindy."

Mrs. Sheehan can sure drum up bi-paritisan support.

Update: Now with 100% more Sharpton!

Catch-and-Release Terrorists

Via The New Editor:

About two weeks ago, word came that Nohe's case had been dismissed by a judge on 7 August. The Coalition was livid. According to American officers, solid cases are continually dismissed without apparent cause. Whatever the reason, the result was that less than two weeks after his release from Abu Ghraib, Nohe was back in Mosul shooting at American soldiers.

LTC Kurilla repeatedly told me of--and I repeatedly wrote about--terrorists who get released only to cause more trouble. Kurilla talked about it almost daily. Apparently, the vigor of his protests had made him an opponent of some in the Army's Detention Facilities chain of command, but had otherwise not changed the policy. And now Kurilla lay shot and in surgery in the same operating room with one of the catch-and-release-terrorists he and other soldiers had been warning everyone about.

Makes you wish we were still sending them to Abu Ghraib, doesn't it?

Wll, we still do. And they like it:

The most serious terrorists do not fear prison here. Captain Jeff VanAntwerp, who commands Alpha Company, recently told me that Iraqis joke among themselves that they would pay 5,000 dinar per night to stay at Abu Ghraib prison. It's air-conditioned, the showers are good, the food is good, and the water is good.

My, how times have changed.

“Cindy, How Can You Be So Cruel?”

Via KWTX:

The father of a slain Central Texas Marine appears in a new TV spot that began airing Thursday, challenging anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan to a debate.

In the spot, Gary Qualls, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Louis Qualls, died in 2004 in Iraq, takes Sheehan to task for calling the President a liar and for erecting a cross bearing his son's name as part of what he calls “your sick cause.”

“Cindy, how can you be so cruel?” Qualls asks in the spot.

Interestingly enough, some of the very same people that have been most outspoken in their belief that President Bush should meet again with Cindy Sheehan, have a decidedly different take on Gary Qualls' request to meet and debate with her.

I was thinking of a different 3 words... they start with "go" and end with "yourself"...

A militant anti-war mother has absolute moral authority. A proud pro-American father is scum unworthy of basic courtesy and is a target for unbridled scorn.

Ignore him Cindy.. But she would rip him up, I saw him on MSNBC, he's a typical southern dumbass.

Not only is he a target for scorn, he's one of those people... you know... red staters...

Is that the brain dead moran that I keep seeing trotted out on cable? Short kind of fat guy that always wears a baseball cap, sounds southern and appears to be learning impaired?

The guy I am thinking of has been making the rounds on all the cable stations as a " * supporter who lost a son in Iraq" (I guess they can only find one person with a dead child delusional or greedy enough to whore themselves out for their Fuhrer) What in the world is there to debate?

I'm not quite clear on this patriotic progressive's meaning.

Are the parents "delusional or greedy enough to whore themselves out for their Fuhrer," in supporting their children's choice to serve their country? Or are our soldiers, sailors and Marines delusional, greedy Furhrer whores for wanting to serve and protect their America?

And last but not least, it wouldn't be a DU conversation without the mandatory Karl Rove reference.

His blatant grandstanding against a grieving mother who is addressing George Bush* -- whose lies & deceit is at issue -- reeks of his being bought by Karl Rove.

But don't you dare question their ideology.

Or their patriotism.

But They Support the Troops?

Well,it wasn't like they could stoop much lower. Via Drudge:

Anti-war protestors besieged wounded and disabled soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C, a new web report will claim!

CNSNews.com is planning to run an expose on Thursday featuring interviews with both protestors and veterans, as well as shots of protest signs with slogans like “Maimed for a Lie.”

As Always, anti-war protestors exhibit nothing but class and the utmost respect for the troops...

Back to Crawford

In case you missed it, Cindy Sheethead is going back to Crawford.

Air America's Corporate Casual

As if stealing money from Alzheimer's patients, underprivilidged kids, and teddy bear companies (just keep scrolling) wasn't enough to make Al Franken gag, Air America's ratings are in (courtesy BSC).

When your ratings bomb this bad, Kevlar becomes the new office dress code.

The Human Cost of Freedom

On the Huffington Post, Cindy Sheehan announces her return to Crawford, Texas to the anti-war vigil she holds to protest her son's "meaningless death" in a "senseless war." She still cannot understand what noble cause her son sacrificed his life for. She laments:

"...every death is now a meaningless one. And the vast majority of our country knows this. So why do more young men and women have to die? And why do more parents have to lose their children and live the rest of their lives with this unbearable grief?"

I can answer it in one word: Freedom.

John Hinderaker of Powerline wrote this morning, Some Thoughts on Casualties in Times of War and Peace, and in it he said:

Sometimes it becomes necessary to state the obvious: being a soldier is a dangerous thing. This is why we honor our service members' courage. For a soldier, sailor or Marine, "courage" isn't an easily-abused abstraction--"it took a lot of courage to vote against the farm bill"--it's a requirement of the job.

Even in peacetime. The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq--now, over 1,800 deaths--is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.

That's right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don't recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President's home town. In fact, I'll offer a free six-pack to the first person who can find evidence that any liberal expressed concern--any concern--about the 18,006 American service members who died accidentally in service of their country from 1983 to 1996.

The point? Being a soldier is not safe, and never will be. Driving in my car this afternoon, I heard a mainstream media reporter say that around 2,000 service men and women have died in Afghanistan and Iraq "on President Bush's watch." As though the job of the Commander in Chief were to make the jobs of our soldiers safe. They're not safe, and they never will be safe, in peacetime, let alone wartime.

What is the President's responsibility? To expend our most precious resources only when necessary, in service of the national interest.

His post got me thinking about what the cost of freedom really is. After hearing Cindy Sheehan announce yet again this morning that her son "died for nothing," I thought I'd crunch some numbers to see what Casey Sheehan's mortal sacrifice, his most precious resource, really bought.

More than he wound have dared imagine.

The numbers above are simplistic, but prove a point: Casey Sheehan and the other 1,800+ who have given their lives in Iraq so far have made their sacrifices very worthwhile.

Casey Sheehan, who re-enlisted to join an all-volunteer Army and who volunteered for the rescue mission that led to his death, gave his life to bring freedom to almost 14,000 people, or roughly the size of a small town.

He gave his life so that a few hundred teachers, a few thousand students, and couple of dozen physicians and thousands of ordinary people could taste freedom for the very first time.

That doesn't sound like a "meaningless death" in a "senseless war" to me.

Another Small Victory

Aki via Chrenkoff:

[One] statement issued by six of the seven Ansar groups promised that there will not be attacks against Americans on the day of the referendum, 'to protect those who go to vote.' 'Voting is a jihad of words and is no different from the jihad of the sword,' the statement said. 'There are no objections to participation in the referendum to show the world our strength and to defeat federalism'.

The terrorists know their only chance to substantially change their fate now is with a ballot instead of a bullet.

I would call the acceptance of the inevitability of a vote, and an acknowledgement of their inability to prevent a vote, another small victory against the insurgency in Iraq.

Ralph Peters' Magical Mystery Recruiting Tour

Look at many center-right blogs—Pardon My English, Blogs for Bush, Say Anything, Common Sense and Wonder, Captain's Quarters, Powerline, Michelle Malkin, and Instapundit among others—and you'll see a bunch of people very happy to report that the Army, Army Reserves,and National Guard are exceeding their recruiting goals virtually across the board, from new enlistments to re-enlistments. I, too, was thrilled to hear the news.

To listen to Ralph Peters of the New York Post, you would think things are great with U.S. Army recruiting efforts.

When the Army attempted to explain that enlistments are cyclical and numbers dip at certain times of the year, the media ignored it. All that mattered was the wonderful news that the Army couldn't find enough soldiers. We were warned, in oh-so-solemn tones, that our military was headed for a train wreck.

Now, as the fiscal year nears an end, the Army's numbers look great. Especially in combat units and Iraq, soldiers are re-enlisting at record levels. And you don't hear a whisper about it from the "mainstream media."

Let's look at the numbers, which offer a different picture of patriotism than the editorial pages do.

Every one of the Army's 10 divisions — its key combat organizations — has exceeded its re-enlistment goal for the year to date. Those with the most intense experience in Iraq have the best rates. The 1st Cavalry Division is at 136 percent of its target, the 3rd Infantry Division at 117 percent.

Among separate combat brigades, the figures are even more startling, with the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division at 178 percent of its goal and the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Mech right behind at 174 percent of its re-enlistment target.

This is unprecedented in wartime. Even in World War II, we needed the draft. Where are the headlines?

Here is a headline for you, Mr. Peters:

General: Army to Miss Recruiting Goals in '05

"We're gonna fall short of our recruiting goal this year. We know that,” Lovelace told FOX News. “We're putting in place mitigation plans to begin to address it in '06."

Military officials will not go into specifics about the numbers of new recruits signing up for Army duty.

...

The Army National Guard, which has been a key part of the the U.S. force in Iraq, missed its recruiting goal for at least the ninth straight month in June and is nearly 19,000 soldiers below its authorized strength, military officials said last month.

In total, the Army Guard has about 331,000 soldiers, 94.5 percent of its authorized strength of 350,000, officials said.

That isn't all. The Stars & Stripes is reporting that:

Although the Army met its July recruiting goal, it is short of its target for the year by about 7,200 recruits, or 13 percent, according to figures released by the Defense Department.

Update: Accordingto NRO,Peters seems to be the victim of "a bureaucratic mix-up." Yeah, like anyone would buy that...

In The Ermy Now

(via AP)

While visiting Camp Lejune, President Bush suddenly realized that the re-enlistment age for Marines had been relaxed a bit too much.

What Would Zarqawi Do?

While I'm greatly bemused by Kos's hinted-at circular firing squad plan for the Democratic Party, I am far from content with the way conservatives are limp-wristing the War in Iraq right now.

A very vocal anti-American and pacifistic minority in the political far, far left believes passionately that we should withdraw all U.S. military forces from Iraq immediately, literally believing that one more American death in this war is a wasted American life. A somewhat larger group believes that we should set a fixed withdrawal date and pull all of our forces out by a pre-determined time. Another large group of Americans feels that we should pull out once some pre-determined conditions have been met.

These three positions are the only positions that matter in the current political environment, though these three positions are far from equal.

"Not One More"
The most radical of the anti-war protestors want the United States to remove all American military forces in an immediate and haphazard retreat. Their stated goal is to save American lives, because "not one more" soldier or Marine should die in Iraq. Some of the fringe elements, such as Cindy Sheehan, even advocate a full withdrawal from Afghanistan as well.

But what could happen if these protestors got their wish for an unconditional withdrawal?

Frankly, no one knows for certain.

While the insurgency has been regularly hyped by the media and are capable of occasionally spectacular attacks, the insurgent movement in Iraq is already close to collapse, as intercepted letters from terrorist leader Abu Mus'ab Zarqawi and terrorist lieutenant Abu Zayd have indicated. A weakened terrorist group with foreign leadership should not be able to win domestically in Iraq against an Iraq military and police force that is increasingly capable of handling it's own affairs. On a straight head to head match-up between Iraqi government and terrorist forces, it is probable that the Iraqi people would destroy the terrorists in their midst, provided they had a chance to get their government established first.

We are currently still in the process of establishing Iraqi military and police forces. On the plus side, there are no shortage of recruits. On the down side, recruits aren't quite where we would have hoped at this point. We need time to train them, and time to withdraw gradually to let them get established and confident before we leave completely.

If Cindy Sheehan and her compatriots in the "not one more" movement got their wish for a headlong retreat, the ensuing chaos as unprepared civilian authorities fought insurgents and criminals in a power vacuum, would cost thousands of innocent civilian lives before Iraqi authorities would be able to restore civil order. This is in one of the better scenarios.

Abu Mus'ab Zarqawi, of course, would have his own plans.

In a worst-case scenario, sectarian tensions exacerbated by Zaraqawi's terrorists or militias like Muqtada al Sadr's could rip the country apart into tribal and ethnic warfare on par with the genocidal slaughters of Bosnia or Rwanda. At this point, the United States would be forced to reinvade Iraq again to tear the warring parties apart, or allow tens of thousands (perhaps more) to die in a civil war.

In the rush to recklessly disengage, the far left would leave millions at risk, just as they led 2 million Cambodians to die in the killing fields after the end of the Vietnam war because of our headlong retreat from Southeast Asia. While Cindy Sheehan and her allies cannot see it, their tactics would result in the most deaths of the three major disengagement strategies.

I doubt this is the legacy the "peace" movement really wants to leave. Perhaps they are just too ignorant to understand their actions.

"Establish a Timetable"
A popular option among most moderate Americans, and one than spans party lines, is the idea of establishing a fixed timetable for withdrawal and strictly sticking to it.

This strategy is not without its merits.

It allows for an orderly withdrawal of United States forces, it proves to the Iraqi people that we are not imperialists as some fear, and it forces Iraqi government and its security forces to try to be prepared for the handover of security duties as the United States withdraws.

There is only one real downside to this disengagement strategy, and that is that a fixed timetable encourages terrorists to simply hold their operations while building stockpiles so that they can mount a massive offensive once we've left.

The hope of this strategy from the terrorist's perspective is that they can simply outwait the American forces that are their greatest threat, and as soon as we've withdrawn, they could launch a "Desert Tet" in an attempt to ignite the same chaos and sectarian violence mentioned previously. The biggest downside is that knowing they can outwait America, they have time to marshal their forces, and rebuild their supply lines. This strategy is less likely to succeed for Abu Mus'ab Zarqawi in the long term than an immediate pullout, but it cold still cause unnecessary mass civilian casualties. The insurgency may have a chance to go out in a devastating blaze of glory, killing thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. I think most Americans would refer to avoid this option if possible.

"When the Time is Right"
The third option is establish a clear set of criteria for what we consider an acceptable set of conditions, and start a phased withdrawal when those conditions are met. It is not important that the public knows exactly what these conditions are; in fact by making these conditions known, it negates them by creating the same scenario above. The terrorists might simply try placate us, artificially creating conditions so that so that we will leave while they regroup.

But it is important that we have these conditions, and that the public knows we have conditions, and that we withdraw when these conditions are met, and no sooner.

In all likelihood, the Bush administration has these conditions set, but it has failed to articulate this fact to the general public. The administration must impress upon the public the importance of completing the mission, wile keeping up the pressure upon the insurgency so that when the Iraqi government transitions into the lead security role, it faces a battered insurgency it can finish off on its own terms, rather than a rested and waiting insurgency able to pose a real threat to the future of Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan or Gandhi?

"It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home."

So who said this, Cindy Sheehan or Mahatma Gandhi.

Hard to tell isn't it?

In 1938, we didn't yet know men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden.

In 2005 the "anti-war" movement has no such excuse.

Friendly Fire

On March 23, 2003, Corporal Patrick R. Nixon was part of a Marine unit ambushed while trying to secure a bridge in Nasiriyah, Iraq. He rushed to the aid of a fellow Marine, and all Hell broke loose. Originally listed as missing, Cpl. Nixon was confirmed as the first Tennessean killed in the invasion of Iraq on March 30, 2003.

Eight of the Marine deaths that day came from enemy fire. A remaining ten died from wounds that may have been caused by either heavy enemy fire or U.S Air Force aircraft providing close air support, so-called "friendly fire."

Nixon's great-grandfather had served in World War I, his grandfather in World War II, his father in Vietnam, and his brother preceded him in the Marine Corps ten years earlier. Patrick Nixon was interred at Arlington National Cemetery on April 17, 2003 in Section 60, Plot 7865.

Country music singer Trace Atkins sings a song inspired by Cpl. Nixon called "Arlington," (sample):

Cpl. Nixon died while trying to save a fellow Marine. If this sounds familiar, it should. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan also died trying to save comrades-in-arms.

Both of these brave men have suffered far too much from friendly fire. At least the fire on Corporal Nixon has stopped, and he has been allowed his eternal rest. Sadly, the assault on Specialist Sheehan continues, somehow both in and against his name.

A Brutal Divorce

Via the Chicago Sun-Times.

Last Friday, in Solano County Court, Casey's father Pat Sheehan filed for divorce. As the New York Times explained Cindy's "separation," "Although she and her estranged husband are both Democrats, she said she is more liberal than he is, and now, more radicalized."

Toppling Saddam and the Taliban (Mrs. Sheehan opposes U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, too), destroying al-Qaida's training camps and helping 50 million Muslims on the first steps to free societies aren't worth the death of a single soldier. But Cindy Sheehan's hatred of Bush is worth the death of her marriage. Watching her and her advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome on TV, I feel the way I felt about that mentally impaired Aussie concert pianist they got to play at the Oscars a few years.

Yet in the wreckage of Pat and Cindy Sheehan's marriage there is surely a lesson for the Democratic Party. As Cindy says, they're both Democrats, but she's "more liberal" and "more radicalized." There are a lot of less liberal and less radicalized Dems out there: They're soft-left-ish on health care and the environment and education and so forth; many have doubts about the war, but they love their country, they have family in the military, and they don't believe in dishonoring American soldiers to make a political point. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the Cindys are now the loudest voice: Michael Moore, Howard Dean, Moveon.org, and Air America, the flailing liberal radio network distracting attention from its own financial scandals by flying down its afternoon host Randi Rhodes to do her show live from Camp Casey. The last time I heard Miss Rhodes she was urging soldiers called up for Iraq to refuse to go -- i.e., to desert.

On unwatched Sunday talk shows, you can still stumble across the occasional sane, responsible Dem. But, in the absence of any serious intellectual attempt to confront their long-term decline, all the energy on the left is with the fringe. The Democratic Party is a coalition of Pat Sheehans and Cindy Sheehans, and the noisier the Cindys get the more estranged the Pats are likely to feel.

Sorry about that, but, if Mrs. Sheehan can insist her son's corpse be the determining factor in American policy on Iraq, I don't see why her marriage can't be a metaphor for the state of the Democratic Party.

Absolute domination by one political party is not good for either party, or America. The ending of a bad marriage between the moderate Democratic majority and a radicalized left wing makes way for the possibility of forging new, potentially more satisfying Democratic Party for all America.

Cindy Sheehan: Hater

Ace has it, go read it.

Saint Cindy's Immaculate Antisemitism.

Cindy Sheehan is, among other things, a proven anti-Semite. She does not like Jews, for those of you who are trying hard not to hear.

Jews, of course, are not the only people she would have die. If you have brown skin and hail from the Middle East at all, it seems, your life isn't worth fighting for. She is not alone in Camp Casey, or in the larger anti-war movement.

This is not exactly what they say directly, but by calling for an immediate withdrawal of all of our forces, and not caring about the power vacuum that would result, they tip their hand. In their eyes, Iraqi lives are worth less than American lives.

They care about "peace?"

Only their own.

Rummy: "Let's Make a Deal"

Who says Don Rumsfeld can't find common cause with liberals?

Adopt a Jihadi.

DU: Rove Caught Strokin' It

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has suffered a mild stroke today, but fortunately suffered no complications and seems to be fine. We wish hims a complete and speedy recovery.

The "reality-based community" was quick to note, however, that Reid's stroke came after the stroke of Cindy Sheehan's 74 year-old mother, and you know what that means:

"KHANNNNNNN!!!", err, uh "ROOOOOOVE!!!"

Luckily for democracy, we have the best and brightest of the Democratic Underground on the case.

From long-time DU poster kilbotfactory:

they already have drugs that cause heart attacks but don't worry, I'm sure the Bush administration would never do something illegal like that...

Why, of course not. Not with these intrepid detectives waiting in the wings.

This is quickly followed up by wakeme2008:

I do not know, a lot of stokes this week and one pulled Cindy out of Crawford which does help *.

If They Take Reid Out, Do the Rethugs Pick Up The Seat?

Yep, they're onto us.

Definitions for Liberals

Delusional (adj): suffering from or characterized by delusions.
See also, Krugman, Paul.

Of course, Goldstein does it better.

The Ghouls of Crawford

(h/t akijikan)

Transcript of a call from a Camp Casey visitor to the Rush Limbaugh radio show, picked up mid-call:

RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You spoke with who?

CALLER: With Cindy Sheehan.

RUSH: You spoke with Cindy Sheehan? Did she cuss you out?

CALLER: No, but I gotta tell you: if they find out out there, they're not the nice people that CNN is showing. I saw them go over and just about attack a young girl who was very distraught because her brother had died in Iraq, and they had all those crosses up, and his name was on the cross. So the mother and the sister came out to remove that. They didn't want him to be a part of that, and so they encircled her, tried to stop her from being able to get the cross, she finally did. They were just about at the point of attacking her, told her that her brother was a murderer, that he had killed innocent people, and that he died for nothing.

What kind of person would use the memory of a fallen soldier as a prop in a bit of political theater, and then have the audacity to attack a family member who did not want him used in that manner? Several descriptive words and phrases come to mind, but I'll refrain from using them here.

If we look into the hearts of those protestors gathered in Crawford, what would we find? Will we find people who care about the lives of our soldiers, or will we find people more worried about other things? Are we confronted with people who truly care about Cindy Sheehan, grieving mother?

It is a sad irony that Casey Sheehan would not be welcomed at the camp that bears his name.

Note: The feeling of ownership of the dead by anti-war protestors does indeed exist.

Sheehan Supporters: I'll Have a Glass

According to a EiTB News article, "anti-was" advocates held a vigil in front of the White House last night.

"We support Cindy Sheehan indiscriminately, said activist spokesperson Maureen Stewart. "As the mother of a dead soldier, she has absolute moral authority. Anything she says must be right.

“She said George W. Bush is personally responsible for her son's death, so it must be true. She said that America and the Heb—Kik—Israelis are responsible for Islamic terrorism, and they obviously are. So we should pull our troops out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, shrieking loudly if at all possible, even if the Iraqis and Afghanis don't yet want us to. It's for their own good.

"And when Mother Sheehan said to that evil Maniac Resident Chimperor Shrub:

"You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don't tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.

Cuz, we're not freer. You're taking away our freedoms. The Iraqi people aren't freer, they're much worse off than before you meddled in their country.

You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine."

"…she was speaking truth to power. It was like listening to Jesus. Or Michael Moore."

Sheehan, who compared America to a cancer and called President Bush the "biggest terrorist in the World," has spurred a new movement among the radical left that wish the bastion of terror that is the United States, the "never was" movement.

This "anti-was" faction, back by an anonymous donor who has only been referred to cryptically as "Dr. K," has decided that the best way to undo the damage caused to the world by America's imperialistic love of war and cheap gas (currently $2.85 in many areas) is to undo America, starting with imperialist American elites.

"Towards that end, we are willing to lead by example," said Stewart. "We're advocating that everyone who wants to rid the world of terrorism join the anti-was movement. If the U.S. never was, terrorism would never be."

Preach on, sister.

Various chapters of the anti-was movement are planning a countrywide protest from Chappaqua to Santa Monica in the near future. Final dates and locations have not yet been determined, but free refreshments have been promised to all those who attend.

A Prayer For the Sheehans

I don't care for Cindy Sheehan. That said, I'm saying a prayer for her and her family tonight. Via the L.A. Times:

The grieving woman who started an anti-war demonstration near President Bush's ranch nearly two weeks ago said today she was leaving because her mother had a stroke.

Cindy Sheehan told reporters she had just received the phone call and was leaving immediately to be with her 74-year-old mother at a Los Angeles hospital.

Some people will be tempted to make stupid comments in situations like this. Please refrain. Keep in mind her mother is also the grandmother of adult children who've lost a brother, their parent's marriage, and to a large entent their mother over the past year.

Thanks.

The Houses Hate JOOOOOOS!

I could not make this up.

The Dems are getting so pathetic they're accusing Mayberry of hosting a lynching, and we know Sheriff Taylor wouldn't stand for that. Seriously, this is more lame than the gay four-year old bit.

It has to stop.

A Compromised Position?

What happens when a newspaper editor (Melanie Sill) for a big daily (the News & Observer) gets caught in a compromising position, telling her audience she works by one set of rules, when four of her fellow editors say that the industry standard is another?

I have a feeling it won't be pretty, and you can follow the impending carnage at John in Carolina.

Another Sheehan Would Serve

According to the The Times Online, Casey Sheehan's younger brother Andy wanted to follow his brother into the armed forces, but was rebuffed by his anti-war mother:

She has had to dissuade her younger son, Andy, from joining the Army. "I said there was no way this Government was going to get another of my children."

I can understand Cindy Sheehan's position. A family that has given one son in the service of their country is certainly under no obligation to provide another. And yet…

Andy Sheehan still wanted to serve, even after his brother Casey's death.

What would drive a young man with a vehemently anti-war mother, and a brother that died serving in the Army in Iraq, to even think about joining a nation's military in a time of war?

I don't know for certain.

But the fact remains that left to his own devices another Sheehan would serve in his nation's armed forces, and I think that says a lot more about the validity of America's cause in this war than mother Cindy Sheehan would like to admit.

But Can Nazis Surf?

So, how would you like race-based government, where the outcome of genetic markers in a blood test may determine your legal rights? If you are a Hawaiian, and Senator Daniel Akaka gets his way with bills before the House and Senate, you might just get a chance to find out.

Akaka is sponsoring a bill, The Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005, to grant native Hawaiians a sovereign race-based government, potentially exempt from the United States Constitution if certain pundits can be believed. Senator Daniel Akaka admits that his bill goes beyond the legal parity afforded to other Native American tribal governments, to the point that it could lead to Hawaii's secession from the United States. A secessionist, race-based government? Peachy.

Call me skeptical, but I'm not a big fan of race-based governments, as the last few that I'm aware of, no mater how they tried to execute it in Germany, South Africa, or Zimbabwe, didn't turn out too well.

You can keep your one state neo-Confederacy movement, Senator, even if it does have poi.

Oh, and I almost forgot. The answer to the post's title question?

Yes. Yes, they can.

Take a Side

Todd Beamer said, "Let's Roll."
Knowing he was going to die, his last act was to charge Islamist terrorists in an airplane cockpit with other passengers on September 11, 2001, in an effort to save innocent lives on the ground.

Cindy Sheehan says, "Let's Run."
Her son Casey gave his life in Iraq in an effort to save the lives of his fellow soldiers. She would surrender the lives of 25 million Iraqi civilians and 25 million Afghani civilians to the will of terrorists.

Ho do you want America to be remembered in history? Do you want to be part of an America that faced terrorism down, and established democracy where evil men would rule, or do you want to be part of an America that quit?

The choice is yours.

Take a side.

Cindy Sheehan: I'm Stark Raving Mad

(h/t Michelle Malkin)

That vast sucking sound you hear is Cindy Sheehan's last bit of credibility going down a hotel toilet in Crawford.

Apparently, in addition to Iraq, we were wrong to invade Afghanistan to depose the Taliban and al Qaeda, and we should surrender there as well.

From Hardball.

MATTHEWS: Can I ask you a tough question? A very tough question.

SHEEHAN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: All right. If your son had been killed in Afghanistan, would you have a different feeling?

SHEEHAN: I don't think so, Chris, because I believe that Afghanistan is almost the same thing. We're fighting terrorism. Or terrorists, we're saying. But they're not contained in a country. This is an ideology and not an enemy. And we know that Iraq, Iraq had no terrorism. They were no threat to the United States of America.

MATTHEWS: But Afghanistan was harboring, the Taliban was harboring al-Qaida which is the group that attacked us on 9/11.

SHEEHAN: Well then we should have gone after al-Qaida and maybe not after the country of Afghanistan.

MATTHEWS: But that's where they were being harbored. That's where they were headquartered. Shouldn't we go after their headquarters? Doesn't that make sense?

SHEEHAN: Well, but there were a lot of innocent people killed in that invasion, too. ... But I'm seeing that we're sending our ground troops in to invade countries where the entire country wasn't the problem. Especially Iraq. Iraq was no problem. And why do we send in invading armies to march into Afghanistan when we're looking for a select group of people in that country?

So I believe that our troops should be brought home out of both places where we're obviously not having any success in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is still on the loose and that's who they told us was responsible for 9/11.

To summarize Cindy Sheehan: Nothing is ever worth fighting for, and nothing is worth defending, except for my son Casey, and because he died, we should abandon 50 million people in two countries.

What a sad, deranged little woman she is. Can anybody out there really still defend her?

Next Time Cindy, Protest in the Fall

…Meanwhile, hitch-hiking his way to Camp Casey, David Duke starts to wish he brought his summer-weight sheets. "Oi vey".

Camp Apathy

Via CBS News:

Ten days into the anti-war seige of President Bush's driveway in Crawford, TX, news photographers are reduced to taking pictures of other news photographers taking pictures of a protestor taking pictures of them.

One begins to wonder just how long an ADD-afflicted media wll be able to drag this one out.

Update: Welcome Instapundit readers. We've got at least one more Crawford protestor photo (courtesy of IMAO) that you might want to see before you head for the front page.

I'd Like to Thank the Academy

Really, it was an honor just to be nominated.

Something's Fishy Here...

"The Man" at GOP and the City has evidence of yet another Google News fraud...

Or does he?

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm not certain that they had Verdana as a font in 1861. Hey Charles, can you take a look at this?

Saccharine Cindy

The sweetness of the Gold Star mother from Vacaville is starting to disappear for many Americans, as the vicious nature, questionable alliances, and radical political leaning of Cindy Sheehan come slowly to light.

Sheehan's popularity among bitter minor celebrities, an infamous white supremacist, and misleading, terrorist-aggrandizing filmmaker are not endearing her to middle America; instead many are repulsed by a woman who:

• hijacked the name and goodwill generated by the real American Gold Star Mothers.
• said of First Daughter's Jenna and Barbara, "let George Bush send his two little party animals to die in Iraq."
• acted as an opening speaker for a convicted terrorist supporter, Lynn Stewart.
• declared that the U.S. system of government is a "morally repugnant."
• says Islamic terrorism will stop if you "get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine," blaming Americans and Israelis for Islamic terrorism.
• said that without the Internet "we would already be a fascist state."
• said that her son "died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana".

How proud her family must be.

Interestingly enough, some rats knew this ship was doomed to sink before it even dropped anchor in Crawford, and wouldn't even get on board. Anti-war heroes Ted Kennedy and protest veteran John Kerry? They're paying lip service to Sheehan but not packing their Stetsons. Harry Reid? Comfortably in Searchlight, Nevada the best I can tell, with no plans to leave.

How about Howard Dean? Sorry, according to the far left, he's the enemy, too.

On the upside, she's probably got the support of burnout David Crosby.

Cindy Sheehan, for all her ability to generate media attention and mobilize the far left, is playing flat in the heartland, and is rapidly approaching a point where her bile is becoming more repulsive than her loss can generate enough sympathy to cover.

Apothegm Designs...

...is on the air.

I can highly recommend Apothegm Designs as they designed this site, and engineered my transition from Blogspot to here as a Munuvian.

You can see my glowing testimonal for them on their site.

Do Your Part: Support Project Valour-IT

I'm not big on asking people to donate their money. I certainly don't ask for it myself, and it is only on the rarest of occasions that I solicit contributions for a few worthy causes. This is one of those rare times.

image swiped from Argghhh!

Click the image to donate to Project Valour-IT, a Soldier's Angels project to get voice-activated laptops for our wounded warriors.

At Last...Her Klan Has Come Along

(h/t Protein Wisdom via LGF)

I guess it was inevitable, but David Duke, America's second most famous Klansman (after West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd), is endorsing Cindy Sheehan now that she's proven herself to be anti-Semetic.

Sheehan hopes to capture endorsements from the National Alliance and the White Aryan Resistance later in the week.

Update: as "Jen" says in the comments:

:::breathing sigh of relief:::

I know I'm the right side of an argument when David Duke is on the other.

Amen, sister.

Cindy Sheehan: Louder, and in the Original German

Sadly, Cindy Sheehan is even more unhinged that I thought. Cindy Sheehan is blaming Israel and the United States as the causes of terrorism, saying:

"You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you'll stop the terrorism."

Israel, of course, is Palestine; the exact same 10,000 square miles at the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea has two names. A brief history of this land is available from MidEastWeb.

Cindy Sheehan is trying to do the same thing with her words that Israel's neighbors have tired to do in 1948-49 during the Israeli War for Independence, the 1956 Sinai War, the on-going Palestian-Israeli conflict, the 1976 Six-Day War, the War of Attrition in 1967-70, and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

She wants to end the Jewish State.

Well, what does Cindy Sheehan propose to do with the more than five million Israeli Jews? She does not directly say, but their welfare seems to be a very low priority for her. I think her kindred spirits in Hezbollah, Hamas, and other groups might have something in mind.

After all, they've been planning it since 1941. See the guy on the right in this picture?

He is a Palestinian by the name of Haj Amin al-Husseini. Like Cindy Sheehan, al-Husseini felt that further violence wouldn't be a problem if the Jews would leave Palestine, or at least the top six feet of soil. He's even pictured talking to this guy about it:

...who agreed on the idea in principle, but who had Jews and other problems of his own to worry about. Fortunately, his final solution didn't quite pan out in his territory either, though not for lack of trying.

Nice ideological company you keep, Mrs. Sheehan. Nice company, indeed.

The Genocidal Pacifism of Cindy Sheehan

A very nice woman named Nancy wrote me earlier today.

She had read the Dallas Morning News which had published some select bits from my earlier post Go to Hell, Cindy Sheehan as the lead article in a blogosphere roundup.

She could not understand my anger at, "a poor woman who has lost her son and is expressing her frustration and grief."

People like Nancy can sympathize with Cindy Sheehan the victim mother who lost her son in war. What they don't seem to grasp is exactly what steps Cindy Sheehan is asking our government to take, and what would result from those steps. Cindy Sheehan wants a unilateral and immediate withdrawal of all United States military forces from Iraq, asking, "How many more of our loved ones need to die in this senseless war?"

Cindy Sheehan's cries are cynical words coated in jagged, razor-sharp malice, folks; she will not create peace, but would plunge a new nation on the brink of freedom into civil war and possibily genocide.

The transition of power from one form or government to another is stressful in the best of times, and Iraq right now is not the best of times. A fledgling democracy that had its first elections just this past January, Iraq is facing not just a new kind of government, but the prospect of building up a new security infrastructure, including military and police units, from the ground up. While these units are larger and much better trained than they were just a few months ago, they are not yet ready to take over Iraq's security and fight a vicious insurgency that seeks to plunge the nation into a bloody sectarian civil war, pitting Shiite versus Sunni versus Kurd.

A gradual transition of power to Iraqi police and military units can prevent this, and is possible even probable within the coming year, but the transition must be gradual to insure domestic stability.

But Cindy Sheehan does not want the logical phased withdrawal from Iraqi that the Secretary of Defense and others said could start occurring with the coming months, she wants a headlong retreat, now. Because of her blinding hatred for George w. Bush, Cindy Sheehan either does not see or does not care that the complete and abrupt retreat she advocates would create conditions favorable for genocide.

Remember Rwanda?

800,000 died there because the world's pacifists did not want soldiers to intervene. Do you want even some small measure of that on your conscience if we follow Cindy Sheehan's desires? Not I.

The false pacifism practiced by Cindy Sheehan is rooted in politics, is used as a weapon, and does not care for human life. If Cindy Sheehan really cared about the lives of people in Iraq, she would call for Congress to give us additional equipment and funding so that we could complete the transition process. Instead she calls for retreat. She calls for dangerously destabilizing a country.

Cold as ice, she has no qualms about playing politics with 25 million Iraqi lives in her mad desire to somehow, in some small way, hurt President Bush. She says herself, "My personal agenda is to make sure someone is held accountable for Casey's death," Sheehan said. "I'm the mother, he was my son, and Bush sent him into a war based on lies."

She wants blood for blood, and as she can't get Presidential blood, Iraqi blood will do.

I've seen enough dead children in Iraq. We don't need the Cindy Sheehan's of the world creating any more of them through the real apathy of false pacifism.

The immediate retreat called for by Cindy Sheehan is nothing more than a call to create a power vacuum that would create conditions favorable for civil war in a nation that has already seen enough bloodshed. I'm sure Cindy's son Casey Sheehan was a wonderful human being, but no man is so special that his death should spark the genocide of thousand or tens of thousands.

I don't need to know him to know that unecessary deaths are not the legacy that Casey Sheehan would have wanted, even if it is the legacy his mother is inadvertently advocating.

Update: Must be a theme night.

Cindy Lied, Soldiers Died!

Michelle Malkin notes that in the 18th paragraph of this Washington Post article that Cindy Sheehan lied about her meeting with President Bush.

In June of 2004 she said:

"I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis," Cindy said after their meeting. "I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."

Just last week on August 7 of 2005, she said:

"Every time we tried to talk about Casey and how much we missed him, he would change the subject. And he acted like it was a party."

These sound like two completely different events, yet both describe Cindy Sheehan's one and only meeting with President George Bush.

The first describes the kind of encounter with President Bush had had with grieving military families many times before. Indeed, it seems consistent with the reactions of other families that met with President Bush at the same time as the Sheehan family. Not a single parent has ever reported anything similar to Cindy Sheehan's newest recollection of that night's events.

Cindy Sheehan will keep on lying to keep in front of the cameras until she get's her son's comrades-in-arms shot or bombed by insurgents encouraged by her message calling for a headlong United States retreat.

She's earned this.

Bu$hitler to Send Cindy Sheehan to Gitmo!

I just figured I'd say it before she makes the claim, which I'm sure is every bit as reliable as Cindy Sheehan's real theory that she'll be executed by the Secret Service.

Update: A RETRACTION. Bu$hilter is sending Cindy Sheehan to Abu Ghraib.

Russ Vaughn: A Soldier-Poet Writes On Cindy Sheehan

Soldier-Poet Russ Vaughn forwarded a link to the following poem he published in The American Thinker after reading some of my comments about Cindy Sheehan published in the Dallas Morning News this morning.

A Useful Death August 13th, 2005

A mother's anguish turns to ire,

Her liquid tears to spears of fire,

A useful fool for the liberal Left,

All hatred now, no more bereft.

The honor which her son embraced,

Is now dishonored, now disgraced,

As his mother stands atop his grave,

From there to shriek, from there to rave.

Yes, some are maddened in their grief,

And grief can surely change belief;

But this woman's views, her family say,

Have long been held, long fore today,

Enabling Leftists to use her grieving,

For Moore deception, Moore deceiving.

I see this mother as a willing fool,

A useful Moorish Code Pinko tool.

As one who fought in another place,

I sorrow for this boy's disgrace,

By a zealot mother grafting grief

Stealing his brave deeds, an honor thief,

Usurping his valor to claim her share,

Five minutes of fame in Media's glare.

Her platform one you don't see often:

A dishonored, flag-draped, soldier's coffin.

I can hear Michael Moore muttering under his breath,

“Yeah, this was really a useful death.”

Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66

The lines quoted by the Dallas Morning News were from Go to Hell, Cindy Sheehan.

Huffington Passed

It is quite sad, really.

I'd heard rumors that Ariana's celebrity blog The Huffington Post moderated comments and weeded out the majority of non-liberal viewpoints. I had the honor of experiencing that yesterday afternoon, but wanted to give them 24 hours just to be sure.

I'd read Norma Lear's "An American Mother Loses Her Son" and was in the comments when I read a particularly ignorant comparison by Huff Post commentor "Karen."

It read:

"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire

I believe in these words.

The Right Wing in this country has completely lost their reverence for these words and the basis of the founding of our country. They slur and revile anyone who doesn't agree with them as 'unpatriotic', and 'America haters'. Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, et al, ought to be ashamed of themselves. They are the antithesis of the spirit that founded this country. If they were alive in 1776, they would be in Red Coats, fighting for King George (how apt) because, after all, he was for 'Preserving our Heritage and Our way of Life'. That is, British.

Cindy Sheehan is the embodiment of our American Heritage: the protester, the lonely voice in the wilderness that says, "NO!!" to the government, the policy-makers, the powers-that-be. Our country has a long, wonderful history of nay-sayers who defy, reject, protest and scream, "No more!!", whether it's Civil Rights for blacks voting rights for women, working rights for all labor...and now we have the most venal, lying contemptuous people in the White House that we have seen in a long, long time (Nixon comes to mind) and she's calling them out. Well done.

Posted by: Karen at August 11, 2005 11:13 PM

To this steaming pile I responded:

Actually Karen, it was the Tories then, like liberals now, that advocated not rocking the boat, and were in favor of leaving the despotic governments in Baghdad and London in charge, no matter the abuses were suffered by a captive people. Then as now, the do-nothings, the appeasers, were charlatans mired in fear of changing the present, and incapable of envisioning a better future. Scared of change, they—you—are trapped to wallow in your insecurities.

It was the revolutionaries then, and the Republicans and many conservative Democrats (including former President Clinton) now that saw that the yolk of tyranny was unacceptable, and that an uncertain war for freedom was better than to live as a slave under an iron hand.

George W. Bush has many faults as all people do, but a lack of vision is not one of his flaws. His vision of bringing democracy to a region written off for decades by the “elite” as too backwards for progress, is no less revolutionary and radical that the decision of a brave few in 13 colonies to strike out on their own uncertain path to bring forth a new government. Very few gave those brave souls a chance 200 plus years ago, and yet they persevered, and brought for a new nation that became the greatest this world has ever known.

Blood was spill in that war and many battles were lost, but those who believed in democracy were not deterred. They fought back against the tyranny. They did not listen to their detractors scared of change. They fought the battle all the way through, and in the end they were victorious.

You are here today enjoying your American freedom because the brave souls of that time period did not fold at the first drop of blood, nor at the first defeat, or the second, or even the tenth. The British terrorized us, burning homes and farms and killing livestock. Tories of the time—then as now, typically coastal urban “elites”—sued to quit and give into the tyranny, much as you do today.

If we listened to them—you—we would not be Americans.

For all his faults, George W. Bush knows that this war will not be easy, and that freedom is not easily won. We will not tire, as you have. We will not falter, though you have surrendered. We will not fail, as the future of 100 million people in the region hangs in the balance. We will place a steadying hand upon the torch of freedom until the Iraqis are ready to carry it on their own.

You, however, would anoint a bereaved Judas as the leader of your headlong retreat, and you will go alone. America will stay, and because of the sacrifices made upon the alter of freedom by Americans, Iraqis and our allies, a new “noble experiment” may hopefully soon arise in the Middle East.

Americans are proud of their history, and proud of our freedoms won by roughly ten percent of our population.

Families proudly proclaim an ancestry to heroes that fought in our founding war. Two hundred years have passed, and no American today proudly proclaims that their ancestors were among the Tories siding with the tyranny of the British crown.

Iraqis may hope to look back at our time from 2205, and count among them their brave ancestors who joined the Iraqi army and police to win their freedom from the terrorists and Tories within their midst. None will admit to have relatives that fought for the insurgency and for despotism. None will look back favorably to those of you in this country who would have given up on their freedom.

Americans will proudly remember that their ancestors fought to free a foreign people and spread freedom to newfound friends.

The liberals of our time will fade into the mists of time as a memory, like their Tory brethren before them.

You will not be missed.

I had a feeling the comment would hit a little too close to home for the Huff Puffers to print, and so I save a copy of my comment right before I posted it.

I guess I was right.

Mohammed Speaks to Cindy Sheehan: "do not waste your son's blood."

(h/t: Protein Wisdom)

Mohammed of Iraq the Model, one of two blogging brothers from Baghdad, sends a message to Cindy Sheehan, the somewhat anti-Semetic and paranoid mother of a dead soldier, who wants us to abandon the quest for democracy in Iraq:

I know how you feel Cindy, I lived among the same pains for 35 years but worse than that was the fear from losing our loved ones at any moment. Even while I'm writing these words to you there are feelings of fear, stress, and sadness that interrupt our lives all the time but in spite of all that I'm sticking hard to hope which if I didn't have I would have died years ago.

Ma'am, we asked for your nation's help and we asked you to stand with us in our war and your nation's act was (and still is) an act of ultimate courage and unmatched sense of humanity.
Our request is justified, death was our daily bread and a million Iraqi mothers were expecting death to knock on their doors at any second to claim someone from their families.
Your face doesn't look strange to me at all; I see it everyday on endless numbers of Iraqi women who were struck by losses like yours.

(read the rest)

Kind of puts things in a perspective, doesn't it?

I wish we could get Mohammed to Crawford, Texas. I want him to camp outside Cindy Sheehan's tent until she'll meet Mohammed face-to-face and tell him that he and the other 25 million people in his country aren't worth the sacrifice.

As I've been saying all along, Cindy Sheehan does not have America's or Iraq's best interests at heart. She wants revenge for her son's death, and would poison anyone, or any hurt any cause, to try to hurt George Bush. In the end, she only hurts America, her brave son's brothers-in-arms and their sacrifices, and fine Iraqi people like Mohammed and his family, who risk their lives every day to try to bring freedom to Iraq.

Freedom should be Casey Sheehan's legacy, not hatred spewed from the side of a dusty Texas road.

Cindy Sheehan: Solomon's Prostitute

¹⁶ Now two prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. ¹⁷ One of them said, "My lord, this woman and I live in the same house. I had a baby while she was there with me. ¹⁸ The third day after my child was born, this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there was no one in the house but the two of us.

¹⁹ "During the night this woman's son died because she lay on him. ²⁰ So she got up in the middle of the night and took my son from my side while I your servant was asleep. She put him by her breast and put her dead son by my breast. ²¹ The next morning, I got up to nurse my son—and he was dead! But when I looked at him closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn't the son I had borne."

²² The other woman said, "No! The living one is my son; the dead one is yours."

But the first one insisted, "No! The dead one is yours; the living one is mine." And so they argued before the king.

²³ The king said, "This one says, 'My son is alive and your son is dead,' while that one says, 'No! Your son is dead and mine is alive.' "

²⁴ Then the king said, "Bring me a sword." So they brought a sword for the king. ²⁵ He then gave an order: "Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other."

²⁶ The woman whose son was alive was filled with compassion for her son and said to the king, "Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don't kill him!"

But the other said, "Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!" [emphasis added]

²⁷ Then the king gave his ruling: "Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother." (Source)

A grieving mother, full of anger and loss, is not always the kindest or most rational of beings.

In that famous story of Solomon's wisdom above, a mother was so distraught over the loss of her child that she was willing to steal another woman's child, or failing that, steal his life.

Cindy Sheehan is this second prostitute in a real life parable unfolding in modern times, where her grief has turned to anger, and anger has turned to hate, until the point has come where her misguided wrath empowers the murderers of her son, and threatens the other sons on the battlefield, his compatriots.

She is no longer rational. She is paranoid. She is broken.

I pity her as I loathe her.

She should not have to bury a son, and yet she should not slander the beliefs he died for in her rage. She should exercise her freedom of speech that she enjoys here, that her son died to create in a foreign land, and yet, she should not use that speech to harm the very men and women of this nation's military that would gladly lay down their lives on her behalf… and have for generations.

More than 1,840 of our best have given their lives to create freedom where none has before existed. The vast, silent majority of these families know what their loved one's sacrifice was meant to bring. It is a travesty that the vultures of liberalism would leach from one sad voice that once gave forth life, but now only seems capable of spreading decay.

Her usefulness will pass. Her grief will remain, after being cruelly heightened by new "friends" that encourage her suffering, but cannot help her find peace. Soon they will be gone, and she will be left, alone and broken, an Army of None.

May God have mercy upon her weak, tortured soul.

Jooooooooos!

Why am I less than surprised to see this in her past?

Cindy Sheehan: Antisemetic Moonbat

Hey... Nice Rants

...But I digress, again. Gee, you sure didn't complain when ol' Bill was spending 90% of his time getting his corn husked by naughty interns, were you?

Mad Dog Vinnie is on fire.

I bow to a master.

Sill Out

A national radio network under investigation by the New York State Attorney General for allegedly funneling $800,000 of federal tax dollars from a charity into their own pockets, isn't national news.

One of the two largest newspapers in North Carolina is apparently unable to generate its own original reporting.

What an interesting carnival Melanie Sill runs at the News & Observer.

Sill is the executive editor and senior vice president for news at the Raleigh, NC News & Observer who made the ill-advised decision to try to bluff blogger John in Carolina about the Air America Radio/Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club scandal. John, as we see here, is polite, but doesn't suffer fools lightly.

The real interest in this story developed for me with this comment from the N&O's Sill yesterday about the Air America scandal:

"We've checked our news services in recent days and do not find this story... if a story is reported and distributed we will look at publishing it."

This was either an untruthful response, or executive editor and senior vice president for news Melanie Sill was grossly incompetent. As a response, a deluge of relevant links poured in from readers, citing sources such as the NY Sun, NY Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, The Oregonian, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and Investor's Business Daily, among other sources in mainstream media outlets across the country.

In addition to mainstream media outlets, weblog search site Technorati.com has no less than ten pages of results for "Air America scandal." Google News reports 288 stories (and growing) on "Air America," and the majority of recent posts are about the brewing scandal not the programming.

The story has progressed so far, in fact, that New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer started an enquiry into the scandal on August 6, and Melanie Sill's news sources "do not find the story?" It seems like the News and Observer should be considering a management shakeup in the news division if this is indeed the case.

Sill started back-pedaling furiously on her N&O blog today:

Thanks for all the interest: sarcasm and barbs duly recorded. Let me clarify: I found the same stories on Air America that you all mention a couple days ago in Internet searches and by using Factiva, a paid service we use for research. I've asked the Associated Press to move a story and mentioned the interest among some local readers. So far this investigation has been reported as a local story in New York.

To publish stories from other publications, we must have rights to them through the news services to which we subscribe.

I don't feel overly defensive about this, so carry on. There are many, many stories in publications all over America that don't gain national distribution. The advantage of the Internet is that people can find these stories themselves, and of course point them out to us, which you all have.

Sill now claims that yesterday she "checked our news services in recent days and do not find this story," but today she says that, "I found the same stories on Air America that you all mention a couple days ago in Internet searches and by using Factiva, a paid service we use for research" [emphasis added].

The technical term for someone who says one thing, and knows that thing to be false escapes me at the moment, but I do think it has something to do with pants being on fire, doesn't it Editor Sill?

Sill then makes two related, weak, and weaseling attempts to justify that fact that they are not running the story.

First she claims:

So far this investigation has been reported as a local story in New York.

I'd like to introduce Melanie Sill to a site on the Word Wide Web called www.airamericaradio.com/. Cleverly hidden in the masthead is a message proclaiming "Air America Radio. 69 Stations Nationswide!"

Even if you knew nothing of them before (which I doubt) their readily accessible web site shows immediately that Air America is a national network, if a rather pathetic one. Even a cursory examination of the story presented so far shows that the important issue is that a national radio network obtained approximately $800,000 from a charity funded by your federal tax dollars. This story could not be much more national. A “local story?” You'll have to come up with a story of your own more credible than that, Mrs. Sill.

Her second excuse was even more anemic:

To publish stories from other publications, we must have rights to them through the news services to which we subscribe.

Madam, you are the executive editor and vice president of news for one of the two largest newspapers in North Carolina. If you are unable to conduct or direct original reporting with all the considerable news-gathering resources you have at your disposal, I think it is time for you to consider another line of work.

Note: John in Carolina, who broke this story, has his latest post online.

Because Cancer Sucks

Cartoonist Chris Muir of Day by Day is asking for help. Please visit his site to see why, or simply click the banner below.

And say a prayer, will you? (h/t: MVRWC)

Democratic Underground: How Can we Know That Iraqis are REALLY Against Being Terrorized?

A hypothetical: Your fellow citizens are being randomly targeted by suicide bombers and snipers as they go about their lives. None of you are obviously inciting this violence; you are simply targets. A pollster asks if you support the terrorists that are killing your friends and neighbors.

Of course you don't.

A recent poll in Iraq shows Iraqis do not support the terrorists launching attacks in their country, Defense Department officials speaking on background said here today.

However, officials said, the poll also shows that Iraqis want foreign troops to leave the country. An Iraqi company conducted the poll between July 12 and 17.

The poll - done as part of the Tips Hotline number campaign - was conducted in Baghdad, Basrah, Salah Ad-Din, Najaf, Diyala and Irbil. More than 1,200 Iraqis answered the questions.

An overwhelming number of Iraqis say there is no justification for attacks on Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security forces or Iraqi public service infrastructure. A total of 94 percent of Iraqis say there is no excuse for attacks on Iraqi security forces, 97 percent say there is no justification for attacking civilians, and 97 percent are against attacks on infrastructure.

Q: What kind of idiot would think that you would like to be terrorized?

A: The kind of idiot you find at the Democratic Underground:

These are odd figures. What's the last real poll you heard of that had 90+% of anyone in agreement? 97, in fact, must be within the margin of error, making it possible the total is 100%. That sounds more like one of Saddam's pretend elections in which he was elected president by 100% of Iraqis.

97% say there is no justification for attacks on infrastructure? I don't think you could even get that in the US.

Even without knowing the source (who is clearly biased), this poll reads like propoganda. It's amazing to me that anyone in this country buys into this stuff.

Of course it is amazing, little liberal. Iraqi citizens are supposed to enjoy having their children blown apart, aren't they? Why, who in their right mind wouldn't want the rampant chaos of a hunted police force, or the medical wonders performed in a bombed out hospital?

Why, this poll must have been rigged, and conducted under the threat of torture by American soldiers:

Was a tank in front of the house when they asked this? Were they on the floor with their hands cuffed behind their back? Maybe they tortured them. These numbers are even less reliable than the ones that say 42% of Americans think WarCriminal is doing a fine job.

Yes, this is your base, Howard Dean. These are the people that "represent out troops" with you, Cindy Sheehan. It just makes you proud to be a Democrat doesn't it?

Bad Moonbat Rising...

Via Moonbat Daily, it seems the DUers have completely flipped out because Cindy Sheehan was having trouble with her cell phone while trying to conduct an interview with Thom Hartmann, who was apparently filling in on Air America.

I'm used to the rampant paranoia of those who post on the Democratic Underground, but have they never had spotty cell phone reception before? Please. Can you hear me now?

It is perhaps just as likley that the break and communications came from the radio station. Now that Alzheimer's patients and inner city orphan's are wise to Air America's embezzlement tricks, AA might not be able to pay their phone bills...

Cindy Sheehan: Cut Them In Half

Just one.

I challenge Cindy Sheehan, who constantly drags out the corpse of her hero son to stand upon like a bloody pulpit, to produce just one email or one letter from Army Specialist Casey Sheehan where he says he was opposed to the war in Iraq.

I strongly suspect she cannot.

Like the second prostitute in I Kings 3:16-27, once her child was dead, Cindy Sheehan didn't care about the deaths of other mother's sons. Her child is dead, and damn all others that would stand between her and her revenge.

All Hail President Hastert!

On Technorati, liberals are going all atwitter over a rumor that Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury is close to handing out indictments against President Bush and his administration:

Although the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago is staying silent, it is well known that Fitzgerald is digging deep into an assortment of serious improprieties among many Bush administration figures based, in part, on subpoenaed testimony provided by former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

According to federal whistleblower Tom Heneghen, who recently reported on www.truthradio.com, Powell testified before the citizen grand jury that President Bush had taken the U.S. to war illegally based on lies, which is a capital crime involving treason under the U.S. Code.

"Regarding the Powell testimony, there is no comment," said Sanborn.

However, sources close to the federal grade jury probe also allegedly told Heneghen a host of administration figures besides Bush were also indicted, including Vice-President Richard Cheney, Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, imprisoned New York Times reporter Judith Miller and former Senior Cheney advisor Mary Matalin.

Oh my, this is too rich. A Bush indictment, along with indictments Vice President Cheney, and what seems to be the majority of his administration? While this is obviously a left wing dream, I think we can probably take this with an ocean or two full of salt.

Why? For starters, "federal whistleblower" Tom Heneghen is the same credible source that maintained MI6 secret agent (and U.S. Senator) John Kerry was being blackmailed after being caught making snuff porn in England with underage girls. It wasn't bad enough Kerry was being accused of making snuff films, you see, but with underage girls. You know, because violent sex driven murder films just aren't enough of a reason to blackmail a British secret agent moonlighting as a United States Senator.

Heneghen is also the same person that claims the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York was just a coverup for a gold heist like in Die Hard III, and that the "missile shield" over D.C. was disarmed before the 9/11 attacks. And yes, as you proably have figured out by now, the Illuminati are involved.

So, while I'm sure you guys on the left are pre-orgasmic in your wishful thinking, I wouldn't enjoy it too much, as it is almost assuredly a bogus story...

Unless of course, President Hastert, Karl Rove (who somehow went from being the focus of the Plame investigation for liberals a few weeks ago to completely uninvolved here), and the Illuminati might just want you to think that.

Better put on your seatbelts and grab that protective headgear; it looks like it is going to be a long August.

Go to Hell, Cindy Sheehan

Let me make this perfectly clear: I loath Cindy Sheehan.

I despise everything she stands for, and love the ideals she stands against. I hate how she dishonors her brave son's memory. I cringe when she utters stupid talking points—“why did the president kill my son?”—and I cannot stand the fact that she egotistically thinks she is more important than the tens of millions of people she would undermine in her quest for vengeance. Clearly, her arrogance knows no limits.

The most important mother in the world.
Cindy Sheehan thinks she is the most important mother in the world.

She is holding a vigil to speak to the president—again—even though she has made it abundantly clear in her comments to the news media that she has nothing new to offer other than clichés. She wants the troops to pull out of Iraq now, no matter the future costs or the wasted sacrifices. She wants Bush to personally account for her son's death. She wants Bush to personally tell her why her son died. She, she, she. Well guess what Cindy?

You are not the only mother who has sent a son off to war. You are one mother of the more than 1,800 troops who died serving their country in a military they volunteered to join, knowing that they could be sent off to war. There are thousands of other mothers who have had their sons and daughters wounded in combat. There are mothers for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, from more than a dozen nations, that have served in Iraq in an effort to bring democracy and hope to that region.

Nor are you more important than the mothers of the 25 million Iraqis that your son Casey was trying to bring freedom. You didn't understand his courage or commitment, and you can't understand why someone who lay down their life for a stranger. That is your problem Cindy Sheehan, and you dishonor your own son's memory every time you open your mouth to fight against everything he gave his life for.

Nor are you more important, Cindy Sheehan than the mothers of the tens of millions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other nations tasting freedom for the first time because of brave men like your late son.

Despite what you think, Cindy Sheehan, you are not more important than any of these millions of other mothers, though you would make all their sacrifices in vain to bring down a President.

Vengeance, not Justice. Hatred, not Hope.
Your son died trying to bring freedom to an oppressed people. I can think of no more noble sacrifice. But you, Cindy Sheehan, you want revenge for your heartache, and you don't care who gets hurt in the process.

That is why you, Cindy Sheehan, can go to hell.

You decided, in a mind warped by your association with head cases like Code Pink and Veterans for Peace, that George W. Bush made your son patriotic and gave him the heart to serve his country, and that George W. Bush made him volunteer for military service, and that George W. Bush forced him to want to make the military his career, and it was George W. Bush that made him re-enlist. And of course, George W. Bush pulled the trigger on the RPG in the Sadr City slum that took his life.

Cindy Sheehan doesn't give a damn about the millions of Iraqis her son was trying to bring freedom. Cindy Sheehan doesn't give a damn about the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that have rotated in and out of Iraq in that same quest. Cindy Sheehan doesn't give a damn if Iraqis are ruled by themselves or if they are tortured by tyrants. She is petty. She is vengeful. She wants revenge, and she doesn't care who gets hurt or who dies in the process.

I am ashamed for Casey Sheehan. He understood that there are things in this world worth giving up your life to create, and he made that sacrifice. His mother Cindy, full of hate, seeks only seeks to destroy.

I can understand her grief, but I cannot forgive the fact that she is willing to threaten the lives of others and give our enemies hope to satisfy her need for revenge.

A terrorist RPG killed the body of Casey Sheehan. It took his mother to try to kill his legacy.

Update: I made few minor tweaks, mostly grammatical.

Another Update: Retired Marine and radio talk show host "Gunny Bob" Newman is apparently on the same wavelength.

What, Me Worry?

So, Iran decided to continue down the path of uranium conversion, which many fear might be an early step in developing a nuclear bomb.

Germany's Joschka Fischer warned of "disastrous consequences" if Iran acquires a bomb.

What ever could he mean?

TEHRAN 14 Dec. (IPS) One of Iran's most influential ruling cleric called Friday on the Muslim states to use nuclear weapon against Israel, assuring them that while such an attack would annihilate Israel, it would cost them "damages only".

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world", Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani told the crowd at the traditional Friday prayers in Tehran.

Nah, it shouldn't concern us one bit...

"George? It's Tony. About that Second Amendment..."

The Independent today reports claims more than 10,000 Muslims in Britain have had at least basic training in small arms and simple explosives. But it gets worse.

"There has been a debate on whether we are facing an insurgency or terrorism," said the source, "and the verdict is on the side of an insurgency."

So, our British allies, which have all but outlawed practical self defense with firearms and even cooking knives, find themselves in the lamentable position of feeling like naked sheep before armed wolves.

Granted, this story doesn't quite pass the smell test, seeming to be highly sensationalized. 10,000 people who know how to something doesn't equate 10,000 people that will use that knowledge for nefarious purposes. There are tens millions of people in Britain who know both how to drive and how to toss back a pint, but I haven't heard of governmental worries of an insurgency of drunk drivers... though it might explain why they all drive on the wrong side of the road…

No, I doubt there is a real insurgency or intifada threat to England, but I also know that any threat of that sort is far more likely to succeed in a disarmed society like Britain than it ever would in the United States.

Remember the North Hollywood shootout? Two heavily-armed criminals with body armor terrorized Los Angeles for 44 minutes, and the LAPD was almost powerless to stop them. Police officers were forced to grab rifles from civilian gun stores, as their police weapons (incidentally, of the same 9x19mm caliber as the pistols and sub-machineguns of British police) were no match for the criminal's armor.

This was a robbery gone bad, perpetrated by just two men. Now imagine a dozen fireteams of 3-4 terrorists, armed with AK-47s and covered in body armor, set loose upon a major metropolitan city.

Normal police weapons such as pistols and submachine guns will not workagainst most body armor, even with multiple hits. In return, the 7.62x39mm round of the AK-47 cuts though most police-issue body armor like a hot knife through butter. It has all the makings of a slaughter.

SWAT teams will not be able to respond quickly due to the chaos, and even in those locations where they can respond, they will respond late (SWAT teams are made up of regular officers who must report to a centralized location to be outfitted before an engagement), and they will be unprepared for a force-on-force battle in the open (most SWAT teams are prepared for CQB assaults on fixed positions) against a trained enemy.

That leaves the city in question largely defended by under-armed (or in Britain, unarmed) patrol officers, and the citizens that decide that taking action into their own hands is their best chance of survival.

Now, in which country would these civilians and patrol officers have a better chance of survival?

English police officers, while brave, would not stand a chance without firearms, and they have little hope of citizens being able to step in to offer credible assistance with their butter knives. Citizen and officer alike would be nearly powerless. They are reduced to waiting until the terrorists run out of ammunition, which isn't exactly a plan I'd endorse.

American citizens, on the other hand, could potentially help their police, or at the very least might be able to offer up some defense of their own lives. The Second Amendment was designed to help the American people defend themselves against tyranny.

If there is indeed another terrorist attack in England, I wouldn't be very surprised to see the British people push for a similar right to self-defense.

Watch Them Dogs

I've been sometimes amused, sometimes amazed, but always saddened by the intense media coverage surrounding Cindy Sheehan's vigil outside of President Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX. If press coverage is any indication, Cindy Sheehan arrived in Texas in a bus called the "Impeachment Express" and is apparently telling everyone who will listen that George Bush killed her son.

She was barking a far different tune a year ago. As reported by her hometown paper the Vacaville, Reporter (via Drudge):

"'I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,' Cindy said after their meeting. 'I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith.'

"The meeting didn't last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son's sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith.

"The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

"For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

"'That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,' Cindy said."

From thanking the President for his support of her family, to publicly accusing him of murdering her son in just over a year, Cindy Sheehan has traveled a long, tortured path. I don't believe the transformation from the mother of a proud soldier, to becoming a shrill mockery of her son's sense of duty, was a path she traveled alone.

I fear she was dogged every step of the way.

Reverend Dr. Bennett Walker Smith, Sr., a fellow southerner who moved to New York, once gave a sermon called "Watch Them Dogs," about the kinds of people you might want to avoid in a church congregation.

A paraphrase of that sermon goes something like this:

There are people like town dogs—overfed, good for nothing and so lazy they won't even scratch fleas. All a town dog does is lie under the porch all day, until late at night when he starts howling at nothing, and he'll keep howling till he has every other dog in the town howling at nothing, too.

And then there are alley dogs, always head down in the filth, dragging rotten things out and causing a terrible stink.

And then there are bird dogs. Bird dogs jump in the bushes and shake things out for the hunters. They won't kill nobody, but they sure will flush them out by pointing. Judas was a bird dog.

And then there are setters. Setters will "set" around and talk and carry on, but when push comes to shove and it is time to get things done, you can't rely on a setter. He won't get behind you.

And then we have poodles. You know poodles—pretty, pampered, always in need of special treatment and good for absolutely nothing. A poodle is a worthless dog, except maybe to other poodles.

All this leads up to a story about the feist terrier. You've seen a feist. They ain't no bigger than nothing, all fur and bark. Well, this particular feist terrier hung out on his master's front porch behind a white picket fence, and every morning, a big Doberman would come by on his morning walk.

Well, this little feist knows that the gate on that fence is always locked, and so every morning when that Doberman goes by, that little feist tears across the porch, down the walk, and hurtles himself up against that gate, barking his fool head of at the Doberman, who pays him no mind. That little feist follows him along the length of the fence barking and carrying on until he comes to the end of the fence, and he keeps right on barking until that Doberman turns the corner.

Every morning this goes on—yap! yap! yap! yap!—and the Doberman ignores that little feist… at least until one fateful day, when the feist's master forgot to lock the gate. The Doberman came by on his walk, and that little feist tore of the porch, hurtled himself against the gate—the gate swung open—and he found himself standing right in front of the Doberman.

Now, that Doberman had been waiting for this day aloooooooong time, and he tore into the feist.

When the Doberman finally let that feist go, that feist was so happy. He dragged himself back up on the porch, battered and bloodied, with one though on his mind…

"Who the hell left open the gate?"

Every day it seems that the craven alleyway hounds and baying town dogs of the media get just a little louder, and bird dogs like Cindy Sheehan do more pointing that emboldens our enemies and ends up getting good people (like her son) killed. The gate unlocked in America on 9/11.

It is time that American liberals learned to quit charging headfirst into it.

The Lamentable Cindy Sheehan

There are a few things in this world that really set me off, with abusing children and disrespecting our veterans near the top of that list. Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan manages to offend both of those sensibilities by exploiting the death of her soldier-son in Iraq to push her moonbat political agenda.

Sheehan is a walking cliche of Democratic Underground-type talking points, clutching a picture of her son in uniform along with a baby picture as film crews come to make her theater, once again. After riding across the country from (where else?) California to Bush's Ranch in Crawford, Texas in a bus called the "Impeachment Express," she says to waiting cameras:

"I want to ask the president, `Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?" she said, her voice cracking with emotion. "Last week, you said my son died for a noble cause' and I want to ask him what that noble cause is?"

The freedom of 25 million Iraqis, for starters.

Your son Casey Sheehan was a credit his country, Cindy. So are the 140,000+ other fathers and mothers, sons and daughters serving their country in Iraq right now.

I don't know that we can say the same for someone who has made her goal in life the undercutting of their morale and support.

60 Years After the Whirlwind

On August 6, 1945, Col. Paul W. Tibbets of the 509th Composite Group took off from Tinian Island hours before sunrise and piloted his B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay towards Japan. At 8:15 a.m., Mocksville, North Carolina native Major Thomas W. Ferebee pulled a lever and watched the 8,900-pound "Little Boy" fall away towards Hiroshima's Aioi Bridge. 43 seconds later, the world officially entered the nuclear age with a boiling, blinding white flash.

Three-score years have passed since that fateful morning, and the veil of time allows revisionists, apologists, and activists to portray the Japanese people as innocent victims of horrible weapons they didn't deserve, and indeed, many individuals were innocent. Japan, however, was reaping what it had sown in Nanking, Bataan, and course, Pearl Harbor.

While our valued allies today, the military society that dominated Japan sixty years ago was more akin to today's Islamic fundamentalists than most would comfortably admit. Fanatical Japanese soldiers were expected to fight to the death, as were all able-bodied Japanese civilians of any age or sex, many only armed with as little as sharpened sticks.

The planners of the invasion of Japan, code-named Operation Downfall, had constructed a two-pronged assault on the Japanese home islands. The opening assault—Operation Olympic—on the southernmost island of Kyushu was expected to generate 250,000 American casualties just in establishing a foothold in the Japanese mainland. The 790,000 Japanese defenders of Kyushu were expected to die, to the last man.

Operation Coronet, the assault on the main Island of Honshu and the Tokyo Plain, was expected to generate one million American casualties by the fall of 1946. The national slogan was "One Hundred Million Will Die for the Emperor and Nation," and every indication was that many Japanese planned to do just that, as 28 million Japanese had become part of the National Volunteer Combat force, armed with everything from obsolete firearms to bow and arrows, swords and spears.

Tens of millions of millions would have died in a Japanese jihad that would have left shell-shocked American soldiers guarding a shattered landscape, and a savaged nation that might have never recovered.

Millions dead, or 200,000 dead?

Major Ferebee never lost a night of sleep for pulling the lever that dropped "Little Boy" from the belly of the Enola Gay. He shouldn't have.

Update: He really shouldn't have. 1996 Nobel Peace Prize finalist R.J. Rummel calls the American decision to use atomic bombs on Japan "democide" and claims it was mass murder worthy of a war crimes trial.

I responded in his comments:

Dr. Rummel, I posit that you start with a false hypothesis: can you categorically state that all democide—which you define vaguely as “murder by government”—is a crime?

Homicide is discouraged in most situations, and yet, there are legally and morally acceptable times when it is implemented in civil societies. The same can be said for suicide, and for your concept of democide.

The Japanese people—not just the military, but the civilian culture that generated that military—were fanatical in a way we most commonly associate now with Islamofascist suicide bombers. From the well-known kamikaze pilots of the air to civilians equipped with primitive blackpowder satchel charges or even swords and spears, the Japanese people were not civilians in the sense we westerners commonly use. They were valid targets, and were expected by our leadership to provide armed opposition to the death.

You further misstate a truth when you make the claim that bombing the “civilians” of Hiroshima, Tokyo, etc were in violation of the Geneva Conventions. That is wrong on many levels, the first being that the Fourth Geneva Convention that covers the treatment of civilians was not signed until August 12, 1949, almost four years after the Japanese surrendered.

Even if the Fourth Convention has been signed before the war instead of after it, the expected use and training of Japanese “civilians” in attacks against American military units would have likely legally classified them as unlawful combatants according to this exact same Convention, just as the Taliban are today.

According to the Geneva Conventions, lawful combats satisfy four criteria: "(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; [and] (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war."

The Japanese “National Volunteer Combat Force” of 28 million “civilians did not satisfy even one of these four criteria. These “civilians” were expected to fight to the death or commit suicide rather than surrender, as tens of thousands of their countrymen, military and civilian, had done on islands across the Pacific, including civilian men, women, and children.

The People's Handbook of Resistance Combat was distributed by the hundreds of thousands in Japan, and sought to teach Japanese men, women, and children to fight with spears against American soldiers with machine guns. They were preparing for a self-induced genocide for their emperor's honor.

The use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and later Nagasaki, were not war crimes, nor were they examples of genocide, nor were they examples of terrorism, nor were they examples of murder.

It was war, a most horrible war against a fanatical enemy that did not honor the concept of “civilians.” This something you seem determined not to understand in your headlong rush to issue condemnation.

Higher Ground

Two societies.

A person in one society who murders innocent civilians is immediately branded a "bloodthirsty terrorist" by his own government. In the other, the person who murders innocent civilians is celebrated as a hero.

I wonder which of these cultures gets to claim the moral high ground?

HEAD LI(n)ES

UPDATE: When you're a blogger and you screw up, you need to own up to it. Guess what? I may have been wrong on the story below.

Eugene Volokh (yeah, that guy), was nice enough to let me know he saw the same headline on this story at the Las Vegas Sun earlier today. Interestingly enough, the Sun version of this story is quite a different version than the version of the Newsday article I worked from, which I present to you in this screen shot:

To further confuse the issue, the Newsday link below now goes to another article on this topic by yet another writer, Dan Sewell.

So what is going on? There is a slight chance that the accusations I made below are true. After all, Google News is proud to consider organisations that the State Department has labeled al Qaeda-friendly disinformation mills as valued news contributors.

But there is perhaps a greater possibility that AP posted the original headline "Ohio Families Fed Up With Loss of Marines," Google dutifully copied it, and then AP or Newsday, perhaps fearing a backlash (kinda like the one below) changed the headline of the NewsDay article to something less offensive, after the Google News link was already up.

I blew it by accusing Google News of faking headlines, and I apologize for making the mistake.

The original (and now debunked) article remains below as a warning to others.

***************************************************

Google News headlines: When the truth isn't bad enough

"Ohio Families Fed Up With Loss of Marines" screams the Google News headline, purporting to be from a Newsday article from Joe Danborn.

But if a reader clicks the link to read the story, a far more sedate "Ohio Families Mourn Troops Killed in Iraq" greets the reader as the story's real headline. While the loss and pain of the family interviewed is obvious, the tone of Google's headline is in no way reflected in the actual article.

But Google News wouldn't purposefully misrepresent headlines… would they? At the time I noticed the seemingly reworked headline of the Marine story, there were three other stories in close proximity on that page:

Google News, or Google Fiction?