This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Democrats rush to victory

    Last week we were treated to the sight of old bags in pink boas with tears streaming down their leathery, bloated cheeks because Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t pull the troops out of Iraq. A lot of theater, not much substance. Now that Code Pink is safely behind bars, or safely leaning on a bar, or barred from Nancy Pelosi’s office, the Demorats can get back to the business of politics.

    Now Mark Pryor, a Democrat from Arkansas, has proposed a “secret” date for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. According to the Washington Post;

    The Arkansas Democrat is a key holdout on his party’s proposal to approve $122 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while setting a goal of March 31, 2008, for winding up military operations in Iraq. Unlike the plan’s Republican opponents, Pryor wants a withdrawal deadline of some kind. He just doesn’t want anyone outside the White House, Congress and the Iraqi government to know what it is.

    So the thing is; the Democrats don’t have to agree on a date, they don’t really have to have a date at all. All they have to do is get on TV and say “Sorry, that’s classified and I can’t talk about it”. They can payoff the anti-war nuts without really having to do anything. And since liberalism is only graded on intentions and not performance, they’ll all get an “A+”. Yay! Brilliant. They can just wait till everyone forgets about it, like Bill Clinton’s promise to withdraw troops from Bosnia (the deadline was 11 years ago, if you’ve lost count, by the way).

    Meanwhile, the Senate is busy loading up the defense with $20 billion worth of pork, according to the Washington Examiner;

    Like their counterparts in the House, the Senate has larded its version of an “emergency” war spending bill with nearly $20 billion in pork-barrel outlays, including $100 million for the two major political parties’ 2008 presidential conventions.

    The $121 billion bill includes $102 billion for the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as $14 billion for Hurricane Katrina aid and more than $4 billion for “emergency farm relief.”

    “Congress will have to make the choice between booze and balloons or bullets and body armor,” John Hart, a spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told The Examiner on Monday. Coburn and a handful of other senators hope to shame their colleagues into stripping the pork out of the war spending bill.

    I guess their eyes just glaze over at the prospect of a defense spending bill. This is how the Democrats support our troops, this how much they love the country. This is how much Democrats care about our National Security.

  • Kidnapping as a foreign policy

    So who’s surprised that the government who’s political leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hostage-taker and kidnapper nearly thirty years ago, is using that same crime today as a bargaining tool? 15 British sailors and marines have become a bargaining chip in Iran’s criminal behavior towards the rest of the world. The rest of the world that has tolerated and turned a blind eye to Iran’s sociopathic antics on the world’s stage for decades.

    The Washington Times reports that Iran will try the 15;

    The Iranian government will charge 15 captured British service members with “illegal entrance into Iranian waters,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said yesterday, raising the stakes in his country’s confrontation with an outraged British government.
        Mr. Mottaki told reporters in New York that the matter had already been referred to the Iranian legal system and that the 14 men and one woman, who were captured in the Persian Gulf on Friday, would stand trial.
        “Iranian authorities intercepted these sailors and marines in Iranian waters,” said the minister, who was in New York for an unrelated vote Saturday in which the U.N. Security Council imposed new sanctions against his government.
        British Prime Minister Tony Blair said “there is no doubt at all” that the seizure took place in Iraqi waters.

    The time has come to deal with Iran in the way that they’ve been begging to be treated all these years. They’ve participated in and paid for kidnapping across the globe to get their way, to fund weapons sales and to fill their coffers - their rogue behavior needs to have a steep price for the Iranians beginning today. In fact, a nice little bombing run on their nuclear facilities will give excellent coverage to a rescue raid (we all know that the Brits know where the sailors and marines are being held – the goat herders aren’t that good at disguising their activities). 

    The DC Examiner reports that China and Russia are putting pressure on Iran to comply with UN demands to stop uranium enrichment. I guess the other two sociopaths see where they can hurt by the fallout of a nuclear-armed Iran in a sanction-conflict with the rest of the civilized world. But Iran continues to suspend it’s pledges, according to the Washington Post/AP.;

    In New York, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, “A few select countries don’t have the right to abuse the Security Council.”

    “The Security Council has to be aware of its own position and status,” he added. “Actions that are illegal, unwarranted and unjustified will reduce the credibility of the Security Council.”

    Mottaki said Iran has repeatedly sought negotiations with the powers that drafted the resolution against the Islamic republic: the five permanent council members — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — and Germany. But he accused those countries of lacking the political will to reach a breakthrough.

    Doesn’t even sound like a sane person who has been watching the news lately, does it? In another article, the Washington Post reports that Iran is feeling the financial squeeze from sanctions;

    More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September, according to Treasury and State officials.

    The financial squeeze has seriously crimped Tehran’s ability to finance petroleum industry projects and to pay for imports. It has also limited Iran’s use of the international financial system to help fund allies and extremist militias in the Middle East, say U.S. officials and economists who track Iran.

    So feeling the walls closing in, the Islamic Republic resorts to the only thing it understands; extortion using the lives of westerners as chits. There’s only one reasonable response to this barbaric behavior. The harsher the better. But, it’ll never happen – the Left and their usual hand-wringing and pleas for civility will stop it. And when the British sailors and Marines are beheaded on YouTube, somehow it’ll be George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s fault. The Left loves to make excuses for bloody tyrants.

  • Biggie as a fearmonger

    Zbigniew “Biggie” Brzezinski, National Security advisor to Jimmy Carter during the decade of National Security advisors with heavy European accents, decides to provide his worthless opinion in the Washington Post on the dangers of the PATRIOT Act and the general and vague dangers of having Republicans fighting terror that he calls “Terrorized by the War on Terror”;

    The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

    The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

    The only damage these three words have done has been propagated by the Left in denying that there is a terror threat. The Left’s pooh-poohing of the threat of terrorists against Americans is the greatest danger to our security.

    But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that “a nation at war” does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being “at war.”

    So, by describing the war in simplistic terms that everyone can understand, the Republicans are coming for our children under the guise of fighting Islamists. Biggie continues on describing in simplistic terms why we should be afraid of our Republican government while he doesn’t provide one concrete example of the government’s abuse of it’s newfound power in those three magic words. He contends that by calling it a War on Terror, it somehow has the force of law. If that’s not fearmongerng, I don’t know fearmongering.

    If you wade through Biggie’s idiot rant about security checkpoints at the Washington Post, you discover that somehow security checkpoints in Washington are worthless symbols of this administration’s fearmongering. The Washington Post is a private company who sells it’s stock on the New York Stock Exchange – President Bush didn’t personally or indirectly erect the metal detectors in WaPo’s foyer. In fact, most of Washington was hiding behind metal detectors and security badges when I first moved to Washington DC in 1999 – more than two years before the evil Republican neocons attacked the poor Muslims, Biggie. That was when government employees were afraid of another attack by the Michigan Militia.

    The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some — even U.S. citizens — incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. 

    Ya mean like these poor innocent muslims have been victimized, Biggie? How about how Arabs are inflicting their barbaric forms of justice on the rest of us? How many terrorists have we beheaded on video? Have we dragged any of the Guantanamo residents through the streets or hung their bodies from overpasses? Do you recommend that we just let the Islamofacists do what they please like they do in Thailand? And how about some examples of this alleged abuse of the civil rights of the people who don’t believe in civil rights anyway? Others can’t find examples either, Biggie, no matter how hard they look.

    Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, “Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia”? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.

    Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This from the guy who didn’t get exercised about 10,000 Soviet combat troops stationed 90 miles from our coastline to prevent us from reacting to the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The guy who let communist guerillas run rampant throughout Central and South America and Africa. The guy whose President was able to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on his inauguration day in full view of his constituency, but who’s successor, four years later, had to make the trip in a bullet-proof limosine because the Carter Clowns had made the world too dangerous for our leader to walk in his own country amongst the people who’d elected him.

    Why shouldn’t there be a reasonable attempt to protect our citizens, Biggie? Just because you don’t give a tiny rat’s ass, doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. I don’t see how a reasonable person can even think that our government is a bigger threat to our citizenry than a culture that already plans our irradication. Honestly, I hope you’re next.

  • To my critics

    Because there’s a serious lack of serious news, I’m using today’s space to answer some of my critics who took offense that I criticized Richard Cohen in his piece entitled “Wasted Lives” in the Washington Post. According to emails, my being named Idiot of the Day of some low-traffic Leftist blog (I’m not providing links because they don’t deserve the traffic) and comments here, I’m naive because I suggested that Cohen and the Democrats’ other willing accomplices in the media shut up for a change until the war against terror ends. This stems from the fact that I don’t understand asymetrical warfare, according to an aspiring journalist who hid her identity when she joined This ain’t Hell and posted a link to this particular blog post on her own blog at Salon.

    Let me explain to this professional feminist a little about warfare. The objective of warfare is to defeat your enemy and to force your political will upon them. As was proven after the First World War, the only way to completely defeat an enemy is to crush him into dust and take away all of his stuff to teach him that there is nothing to gain from miitary operations against the rest of the world. We learned that particular lesson during our Civil War and introduced the concept to the world in the Second World War.

    The Europeans had a tough time learning that lesson because they were pretty much convinced that State leaders were all rational people, which led to the Napoleanic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Great War and the Second World War. After the first three, armies that had been defeated on the battlefield, went home, rebuilt their armies and arms and started where they had left off. In fact, Europeans are so clueless, the Germans attacked France through the Ardennes Forest four times between 1870 and 1944 and each time the French were surprised. So why, pray tell, would we bother to listen to them when it comes to fighting wars? What lessons could we possibly learn from the apparently retarded Europeans who do the same thing over-and-over in exactly the same manner expecting different results each time?

    I know the Left thinks it’s compassionate and enlightened to be merciful to our enemies. Look what being merciful to Saddam Hussein brought us. We let him escape with a large portion of his forces in 1991. Within weeks, he turned the remnants of his troops and tanks on his own population while we, the American fighting men and women who’d defeated Hussein’s Army, stood in mute disbelief along the Euphrates River watching the terror he’d wrought on the horizon. But we knew it was coming, we understand the consequences of not finishing a fight. In fact, when our commander announced on our radios that the ceasefire was in effect at about 8 am, February 28th, 1991, I turned to my Lieutenant and prophetically remarked “Our kids will be back to finish this”.

    At that moment, we were still receiving fire from an entrenched enemy force. We just turned and drove off while Iraqi bullets richoceted off of our turrets. It took twelve years for US troops to pick up where we left off.

    Well, I said all that to say this; war has objectives, it doesn’t happen in some vacuum of history like some arbitrary natural disaster. The war of the jihadists is a war against civilization. They prey on the sympathy of of reasonable people – but the jihadists are not reasonable people. Jihadists think that reasonable people are weak tools that they can manipulate to defeat a stronger, more rational foe. Jihadists live for headlines, they declare victory when reasonable people try to reach reasonable agreements with them. And because they’ve declared their victories, and consider themselves the victors, they feel as if they don’t have an obligation to live up to their end of the bargain. – and so the war continues.

    When Mr. Cohen calls our troops’ deaths “wasted lives”, the jihadists revel in it. If the media and the Democrats got behind the war, got behind our troops, if the Left decided that winning this war was more important than winning the next election, there’d be no small victories for the jihadists. In fact, I’d bet that if ya’all’d been behind the war from the start, it’s be pretty much over. Why do I think this? Look at how quickly Qaddafi surrendered his weapons of mass destruction when this administration launched attacks against Hussein in 2003. Look how willing Arafat was to negotiate with Israel after the Gulf War – and then look at how arrogant he became during the Rye negotiations eight years later, when the Clinton gang tried to give him everything under the sun.

    Without the purely political wrangling carried out on the front page of the newspaper everyday, there’d be nothing to win, asymetrical warfare be damned. Your asymetrical warfare is just a term used by pseudo-intellectuals to compound the sense of the uselessness of war, the immutable laws of total warfare remain in effect. The jihadists are only encouraged by your defeatist language. It’s you who doesn’t understand asymetrical warfare – all your handwringing and empty platitudes are exactly why the jihadists continue to fight. They have no real ideology to defend, no treasure to protect, no land or resources particularly worth our trouble. If you take away the possibilty of his victory, what cause has the enemy to fight and die?

  • Banned in China

    Well, I guess I run too many links to Bill Gertz stories, now this blog is banned in China according to Great Firewall of China.

  • Democrats rush to surrender

    Yesterday, the Democrats, who’ve proved that the only thing they’ll fight for is surrender, squeaked out a 218 – 212 vote victory over common sense. If they’d spent as much time trying to figure out a successful way of winning this war against terror as they spend trying to surrender to the jihadists, we might have already won this war.

    With Code Pink’s shock troops safely behind bars, Nancy Pelosi announced;

    “Proudly, this new Congress voted to bring an end to the war in Iraq and took a giant step in that direction,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after the bill passed by a 218-212 vote. 

    I’m glad they did it proudly, because that’s way they’ll be sent home next year. Now that they’ve pandered to the fickle whims of their most vocal supporters instead of the American people, when this war ends successfully (despite Democrats’ best efforts to the contrary) the American people are going to remember who tried to dick over the troops.

    And then good ol’ Geoge Bush, the one I voted for twice, not the one who’s been caving in lately, found his cajones again;

    Within minutes of passage, Bush denounced the bill as “an act of political theater” and an abdication of responsibility, sternly repeating his pledge to veto it.

    “These Democrats believe that the longer they can delay funding for our troops, the more likely they are to force me to accept restrictions on our commanders, an artificial timetable for withdrawal, and their pet spending projects. This is not going to happen,” the president said. “The Democrats have sent their message. Now it’s time to send their money.”

    Which is exactly right. The Democrats, suffering from the Bush Derangement Syndrome, have completely neglected the fact that is a real shooting war, and a bunch of fat old bags dressed in garish pink feather boas shouldn’t be running our foreign policy.

    More on the President’s reaction from Crotchety Old Bastard.

    So what did Code Pink’s antics get us? According to the DC Examiner;

    The $124 billion House legislation would pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year but would require that combat troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 – or earlier if the Iraqi government did not meet certain requirements. Democrats said it was time to heed the mandate of their election sweep last November, which gave them control of Congress.

    “The American people have lost faith in the president’s conduct of this war,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The American people see the reality of the war, the president does not.”

    It’s the Murtha Slow Bleed Plan in drag. And the usual Nancy Pelosi hyperbole. I suggest that Democrats didn’t see last weekend that more anti-anti-war protesters showed up in DC than anti-war protesters. And that’s the reality of American support for the winning of this war that Democrats refuse to see.

    Curt at Flopping Aces reminds us of the swamp draining pledge Democrats just won’t keep.

    Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette’s MilBlogs describes the impact on our forces from this ill-conceived brainfart legislation.

    Sidebar; In researching this, I discovered that I probably haven’t been paying attention as well as I should. It seems that the commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan, LTG Karl Eikenberry was my very first platoon leader back when I was a fuzz-faced private E-2 with five jumps. Who’d athunk it back then. Jeez, I’m old. Rock on, sir! 

  • Plame testimony shifting?

    According to Rowan Scarborough of the DC Examiner, Valerie Plames recollection of events leading up to her husband, media whore Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger has changed;

    “This is a whole new story,” the source told The Examiner.

    A 2004 committee report quoted a CIA worker, whom it identified as a “reports officer,” as telling staff that Plame offered up her husband’s name. It also quoted from a memo Plame wrote recommending her husband for the trip.

    “We have checked the transcript of the comments made to the committee by the former reports officer and I stand by the committee’s description of his comments,” said Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I stand by the findings of the committee’s report.”

    Bond said he was willing to re-interview witnesses. Melvin Dubee, spokesman for committee chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said he has heard no such talk on the Democratic side.

    Imagine that, Jay Rockefeller’s staff knows nothing about this, even though Rockefeller was in both meetings (2004 and 2007), too.

  • So how’s the war going, journalists?

    While the US military is kicking ass and taking names, where’s the “mainstream media”? Well, they’d prefer to focus on idiot stories instead. from the NY Times we learn how the military has revised their desertion numbers up. And the Washington Post wants to tell us how insecure the UN Secretary General was yesterday when a rocket struck a block away from him.

    While they’ve vitually ignored the fact that the “surge” is working, you have to find out the truth from the blogosphere, places like Flopping Aces, Black Five, Mudville Gazette’s MilBlogs, Crotchety Old Bastard, Michael Yon, Bill Rogio, Dadmanly among countless others. If you want to find out how many veterans the war protesters encountered last weekend, you have to go to the blogs because the NY Times called them a “few hundred” and the Washington Post called them a “rally”.

    When John Murtha calls our troops murderers, when Dick Durbin says our troops are no better than SS guards, it’s headlines splashed across the Times and Post. When an American Marine throws himself on a grenade to save his comrades from certain death, you have to go to the blogs to find out about it.

    It’s a sad state of affairs when the media is so entrenched against the American people that they’ll sacrifice our national security for an empty and dying political ideology.