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

Category: Historical

  • Fences make good neighbors

    I’m beginning to wonder what the Left has against walls and fences. Reading the most partisan hack in the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, on the subject of the “gated communities” in Baghdad makes me think that the Left has never liked a fence or wall;

    Basically, we’re turning Baghdad into Belfast.

    This is supposed to be a temporary expedient, a way to tamp down Iraq’s sectarian civil war — in the capital, at least, the ostensible goal of George W. Bush’s fraudulent “surge” policy — by making it harder for the antagonists to get at each other’s throats. The “peace lines” in Belfast, separating Protestants from Catholics, were supposed to be temporary, too. That network of walls was begun in the 1970s.

    The construction of barriers and checkpoints that turn Baghdad neighborhoods into what U.S. officers sardonically call “gated communities” is another sign — as if more evidence were needed — that Bush’s “surge” is nothing more than a maneuver to buy time. His open-ended commitment for U.S. forces to patrol those barriers and guard those checkpoints will become the next president’s problem.

    But the Left is adamantly opposed to walls anywhere, as near as I can tell. Republicans want a wall along our southern border to keep illegal immigrants from infiltrating into our country and then dying of thirst or from bands of roving preditors.

    The Left also oppose the Israelis building a wall to protect themselves from Palestinian baby-killers. And it almost seems to be working.

    If the Left are peace-mongers, as they claim, wouldn’t building protective walls be a reasonable alternative to snipers and armed paramilitary police forces enforcing curfews at the point of a gun? It almost seems reasonable to me.

    During the 60s, 70s and 80s, the Left resigned themselves to the fact that the Communists had erected a deadly barrier across Europe to keep the Soviet population enslaved. The Left continues to tolerate the barrier that slashes the Korean pennisula’s two opposing ideologies. 

    In fact, the Left trembled when Ronald Reagan demanded that Soviet Premier Gorbachov tear down his wall from the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate.  And they lamented the end of history, and the failures of their ideology when that wall finally fell.

    I guess walls are only a good idea when they’re used to preserve Leftist ideology against evil capitalists instead of a bulwark for peace.

    Omar from Iraq the Model (writing on Pajamas Media) gives his thoughts on the walls from an Iraqi point of view – not from a partisan-hack-masquerading-as-a-journalist-point-of-view.

    Maybe Robinson should have taken the time to ask Iraqis what they thought of the walls instead of just going off-cocked against the Administration, specifically, and Republicans, generally, in his usual modus operandi. 

  • Reid; The war is lost (Updated)

    I noticed on a couple of blogs and discussion boards last night that Harry Reid can’t wait for the new tactical plan and the new commander in Iraq to have their effect so he called it a defeat pre-emptively. The Washington Post buried the story on page 3 (it’s not on their front web page, either – I had to “search” “Reid+war+is+lost”);

    President Bush warned Thursday that pulling out of Iraq too soon would trigger a bloodbath akin to that of the Cambodian killing fields of the 1970s, while Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid declared that it is too late to stay because the war has already been lost.

    On a day that reverberated with echoes of the Vietnam War era, Bush and Reid (D-Nev.) engaged in a long-distance debate over the lessons of history and the fate of the latest overseas war as part of a struggle over $100 billion in funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reid cast Iraq as another Vietnam and Bush as another Lyndon B. Johnson, while the president described dire consequences if the past repeats itself.

    And over at the Washington Times, Joseph Curl and S.A. Miller report that Reid was having a senior moment and can’t distinguish between things that only happen in his mind and things that happen with real people;

    “This war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” Mr. Reid, Nevada Democrat, said at a Capitol Hill press conference with anti-war state legislators.
        Mr. Reid said that both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates agree with his position, though neither has ever declared defeat.
        “You have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows,” said Mr. Reid, who left the press conference without fielding follow-up questions.
        The White House said no one recalled Mr. Reid saying “the war is lost” at the meeting with the president.

    Surprisingly enough, when I called Reid’s office this morning just to be sure that the media didn’t quote him wrong or take him out context, my call got switched to a mail box which was full and then dumped. Hmmm-I wonder if Reid is taking any heat.

    The Washington Post story goes on to illustrate how dingy Harry really is;

    “I know that I was like the odd guy out yesterday at the White House,” Reid said. “But I, at least, told him what he needed to hear, not what he wants to hear. I did that, and my conscience is clear.”

    So even though no one in the White House, according to the Washington Times, remembers Harry saying the war is lost, Harry still thinks it happened. And the Washington Times tells us the troops aren’t even in theater while Reid is calling it a failure;

    Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, this week said a little over half of the 25,000-troop surge he requested has arrived in Baghdad.

    Crotchety Old Bastard emailed me last night (for those of you who don’t know, his son deployed to Iraq late last year on the speartip of the surge in the mighty 1/325th Airborne Infantry Regiment) and he’s asking for everyone to post comments that he can print out and dump on Reid’s desk when he visits here soon. Michele Malkin put COB’s letter to Reid on her front page.

    Curt at Flopping Aces has the best multi-media blog post I’ve seen on this latest crybaby Dingy Harry exercise in mental masturbation. Although, Crotchety Old Bastard is much angrier.

    UPDATE: OK, so I got through to Reid’s office this morning at about 8:30 and talked to his press office. The young man explained to me that Reid’s comments were taken out of context and that Senator Reid regrets that he’s been misquoted. Apparently, Reid said “As long as we continue to follow the president’s current strategy, the war is lost.”

    My original contention that Reid is ignoring the fact that the new strategy hasn’t even been fully implemented still stands. Reid’s office told me that the new strategy must include the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group – that the bulk of US troops need to be “redeployed” (his word not mine) out of Iraq.

    That’s just baffling. While Reid is calling the President a reincarnation of Lyndon Johnson, he’s also calling for implementing the Johnson policy of reaction forces to protect mobile training teams. So I guess we’re at the point where we just have to assume that Harry Reid is insane as well as being a lying political sack of camel dung.

  • Reading assignment and miscellaneous stuff

    Having a busy weekend. Something happened thirty years ago today and my wife is fairly angry that I don’t remember what it was. Hope I figure it out soon so I can get pancakes for breakfast. So while I get my brain housing group soaked in RBC, get smarter and stuff at these blogs;

    If you read nothing else this weekend read Andrew Walden’s “Learning from George McGovern and Earl Browder” on The American Thinker. Excellent.

    And, if you’ve got an hour or so, read this from Eject! Eject! Eject! and every time you need an uncommon dose of common sense.

    Blackfive discovers why the Iraqi Parliament was vulnerable to attack this past week. 

    If you still think that Liberalism hasn’t become a religious faith, read Samhita’s “analysis” – notice the emphasis on the first half of the word – (via Crotchety Old Bastard, Ace Of Spades and Protein Wisdom) of the Duke University cluster. Please be prepared to take a shower afterwards. 

    And, if Sharpton “brought down” Imus, Imus’ fall couldn’t have started very far from the bottom. And who believes anyone on this planet would waste even a nanosecond of their life to locate contact information so they could threaten Al Sharpton? I figure he’ll choke on his own bile soon enough.

    Don’t miss Sharpton’s stammering defense of his inability to apologize for his misdeeds in the Tawana Brawley case (oddly enough, it echoes the post from Samhita mentioned above) to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday when it gets rebroadcast this afternoon. While waiting, read about Sharpton’s attack on the entire German Army. I guess Imus gave him the courage to run to every open mic he sees. If there’s a reason Imus deserved to be fired, it was for kissing Sharpton’s ring more than anything else.

    Meanwhile, Curt at Flopping Aces , via Screw Loose Change, discovers the REAL reason Imus was fired.

    El Presidente at Slapstick Politics asks why we should trust climate experts on Global Warming when they can’t get the weekend weather right. 

  • Summits, summits everywhere…

    Washington Times reports two summits happening for the benefit of Iraq in the next few weeks. One in Egypt on May 3rd for the “Arab Street” and one in the White House for the Democrat leadership next week.

    From WashTimes David Sands, Iraqi hopes are pinned to the outcome of their Egypt meeting;

    “It would be a real slap in the face” if the May 3 gathering at the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el Sheik failed to produce concrete offers, Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. undersecretary-general overseeing the Iraq-reconstruction program, said in an interview Tuesday with The Washington Times.
        “It could undermine the vision of [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] al-Maliki and his government to take the steps needed to restore Iraq’s economy,” the veteran Nigerian diplomat added.
        Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh warned on a Washington visit yesterday that Iran is ready to expand its clout inside Iraq if Arab rivals like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait fail to support Iraq’s economic recovery.
        “If the Arab countries do not step up, Iran’s influence in Iraq will grow,” Mr. al-Dabbagh said. 

    Later on in the story, Sands tells us that the US and the “Paris Club” are forgiving substantial portions Iraq’s $120 billion debt, but the Arabs aren’t so forthcoming on forgiving the debts of their Arab neighbor.

    Isn’t that what started this mess in the first place? I remember Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 because he was deeply indebted to his Arab brothers after fighting off the Iranians and preventing the spread of fundamentalism throughout the Gulf region. Kuwait wouldn’t give him any concessions or breaks on repayment so he took their oilfields (a REAL war for oil). Well, I guess no one has ever accused the Arabs of learning from history.

    The other summit, according to Joseph Curl and S.A. Miller, is the meeting in the White House that President offered to the Democrats the other day and they spent all day yesterday feigning outrage that the President was sticking to his principles rather than caving in to their $20 billion graft-ridden defense supplemental bill.

      “We will listen to his position, but in return we will insist that he listen to concerns of the American people that his policies in Iraq have failed and we need to change course,” they said.
        Earlier in the day, Mr. Reid balked when the White House announced that the Nevada Democrat had agreed to attend the meeting and discuss the $100 billion war-funding bill that Mr. Bush has vowed to veto.
        Reid spokesman Jim Manley had said the Nevada Democrat would rebuff offers to talk until he gets “a signal from the White House that they are prepared to drop their demand that this meeting is a listening session only and this meeting will not include negotiations.”
        Mrs. Pelosi, California Democrat, also began the day declining Mr. Bush’s invitation — reiterating the stance the leaders took Tuesday after the White House characterized Congress’ role in the meeting as listeners not negotiators.
        There was no indication from the White House last night that the president had altered the terms of his invitation.

    I guess the Democrats workshopped their response and found out they’d be holding the brown end of the stick. That “concerns of the American” people crap is wearing a little thin. I’ll say it one more time for those of you not paying attention; if you spoke for the American people, we would have elected enough of you that you wouldn’t have to worry about the President’s veto.

    I hope whichever way these meetings break, it’s in the best interest of the iraqi people – who really do need a break from all of this posturing and politicking.

  • Clinton economy overshadowed by the Bush economy

    Bill Sammon of the Washington Examiner reports today that the White House says the economy over which this administration has presided is more robust than the Clinton era economy;

    The White House says the economic surge that began five and a half years ago on President Bush’s watch is more robust than the much-touted expansion during the Clinton administration.

    “This is a much stronger expansion in a lot of ways,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto told The Examiner. “It’s much deeper and more measured.”

    Fratto’s assertion was disputed by Gene Sperling, economic adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spoke to The Examiner in his capacity as former National Economic Adviser to President Bill Clinton.

    “That’s a rather absurd claim,” said Sperling, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. “In terms of job creation, in terms of wage growth, in terms of business investment, in terms of poverty, there’s absolutely no comparison.”

    Sperling is right – there is no comparison. The last half of the Clinton economic growth was built on pure speculation rather than based on sound economic indicators. Stock prices were 80 times earnings – meaning that dividends didn’t justify the stock prices. That’s called speculation. The Clinton Administration announced in 1997 that they had completely made the stock market safe for investors by ending negative business cycles. Just three years before we discovered how Enron had fooled investors into investing in their failing company for more than three years.

    In fact, Enron should have become the symbol of the Clinton Administration’s economic policy. Enron’s board and employees were complicit in building a cardboard facade around an empty building. I find it hard to feel sorry for Enron employees who lost their fortunes in company stock. There had to be rumors circulating among them about the fake trading floors, ther had to people who knew Enron was engaged in defrauding investors.

    At the very least, employees had to know that no one invests their entire lifesavings in one company. Irrational investments result from succumbing to greed. My wife works for Lockheed Martin, but we certainly don’t have all of her retirement in L-M stock. What goes up eventually comes down. You don’t win in the stock market by following the crowd – you have to be there when everyone gets there and then leave quickly. 

    By the same token, there had to be members of the Clinton Administration who knew they were defrauding the American people by trumpeting the ballooning US economy that was inevitably heading for a crash. Companies with no business plans were selling stock hand over fist, investors were borrowing on their houses to invest. And when it all began to collapse in March 2000 (oddly enough on the day that the Clinton Administration Justice Department filed charges against Microsoft), investors who had believed the bluster and chest pounding from the Clinton White House had to come up with cash to pay off their debts (in their refi’d homes and margin accounts), which meant selling depreciated stock, which in turn drove the market lower.

    So while the stock market spiraled south, companies who had pennies of earnings and had existed soley to sell their stock, shuttered their doors and layed off employees in droves. Who did the Clintons blame? Who else – Candidate Bush who had, supposedly, “talked the economy down”. In fact, there were employees working for companies that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. The Clintons thought that they could base an economy on their incessant yammering.

    But this economy is based on solid growth, no one has tried to talk this economy as hard as the Democrats (worst economy since Herbert Hoover?) and it remains unaffected. Investor confidence is moderate, employment is solid (although it must turn south sometime and probably this year), investors are investing in solid companies, not speculating – although Jim Cramer would like them to do otherwise. 401k and IRA money is still pouring into the market at a record pace with increased contribution limits (thanks to the Bush tax cuts).  

    Sperling has always been one of the “legacy builders” at the Clinton Administration, but no amount of blather can rewrite history.

  • Beating Dead Horses Week at WaPo

    Back on Tuesday, the Washington Post was having conniptions over the “16 words” in President Bush’s State of the Union speech of 2003 (please note it was four years ago) today it’s Hussein’s ties to al Qaida;

    Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides “all confirmed” that Hussein’s regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

    The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community’s prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

    We already know that nothing we can say can convince anyone on the Left, those poor victims of Bush Derangement Syndrome, that war against Hussein was justified. In fact I’ve been involved in a month-long email argument with a old high school buddy who lives in Spain these days. He trots out all of the tired old “Bush lied…” lines and the “Where’s the WMDs…?” and poor old Saddam Hussein was just sitting there minding his own business when suddenly Bush sent our troops into Iraq with no provocation. Ho-hum.

    Nothing can convince the terrorist/dictator hugging Left that the war was justified. So why do we bother?

    I guess the fact that Abu Nidal lived in an apartment in downtown Baghdad for two decades isn’t an indication that Hussein supported terrorists. Or the fact that Hussein was writing checks to Palestinian suicide bomber’s families points fingers at Iraq as a rogue nation. And I guess Hussein’s forces attacking UN-sanctioned flights to enforce the no fly zones wasn’t proof that he had no intention to function as a rational actor in world politics.

    Remember why Operation Desert Fox started in 1998? Because twice in three years, Hussein had massed his troops on the Kuwaiti frontier and threatened his neighbor again. And twice in three years, Clinton had to deploy US troops to Kuwait to stand by and act as a speed bump to Hussein’s newest assault, should it come to pass. Yeah, OK, it never came to pass, but how much money were we spending every year to send a Brigade task force and it’s accompanying accoutrements to sit in the Kuwaiti desert?

    But that’s not enough for the Washington Post. They continue;

    The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons of mass destruction were “episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other channels,” the inspector general’s report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA report describing the relationship as more closely resembling “two organizations trying to feel out or exploit each other” rather than cooperating operationally.

    The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that “available reporting is not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship” between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, it said.

    So you see, the reasons we go to war have to be rooted in evidentiary terms now. War is fought by lawyers apparently, not by using common sense and drawing straight lines from event to event and predicting the final outcome.

    Why would the Washington Post get their panties in wad? Because the Vice President went on the Rush Limbaugh show (over the heads of the traditional media – that sneak) and said, according to the Post;

    “This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq,” Cheney told Limbaugh’s listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had “led the charge for Iraq.” Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would “play right into the hands of al-Qaeda.”

    So Chris Dodd and the Washington Post needed a comeback. So the Washington Post puts out a frontpage article telling the world how Bush lied (when and where he lied, I have no idea…Washington Post doesn’t go into that…but then their readers aren’t smart enough to get past the headline, anyway), and at the end of the story (their readers probably won’t get that far) they bury;

    Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

    So Zarqawi was only occasionally associated with al Qaida. That makes him harmless, I suppose. Excellent job at muddying the waters with a non-story, R. Jeffrey Smith. 

    Curt at Flopping Aces has much more.

  • Just everybody shut up for a bit

    I’m reading Robert Novak’s column in the Washington Post this morning which is just so much hand-wringing over a missed opportunity for peace in Israel.

    The aphorism (originated by Israeli statesman Abba Eban) that Arabs “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” now can be applied to Israel. Last week’s Riyadh declaration indicated the willingness of the Arab world to consider a peaceful solution. Now, belief here among peace-seekers is that nothing will happen until a new president enters the Oval Office in 2009.

    Gee, I wonder why that is? Maybe it’s because the US isn’t perceived as a reliable broker any longer – not because of President Bush and his cabinet, but because, apparently we have 300 million Secretaries of State these days. Everyone with pocket change to buy a ticket flies off to the Middle East, presents themselves as negotiators, swap recipes and tramples innocent bystanders getting to the microphones to trumpet their accomplishments.

    With this president, it began with Congressman McDermott way back in October 2002 when McDermott announced that Saddam Hussein was more trustworthy than President Bush. I’ll use Larry Elder’s recount of the event;

    Standing in Iraq, McDermott incredibly insisted that Americans “have to take the Iraqis on their face value.” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked McDermott, “Before you left for Baghdad, you said the president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war. Do you really believe that?” Following a rambling reply, McDermott finally said, “I think the president would mislead the American people.”

    How can the world have trust in our word with crackpots like that getting face time? Then you’ve got Hillary Clinton telling the New York Post that the President knew about 9-11 attacks before hand and Cynthia McKinney calling for investigations of the Bush Administration before the dust had settled in New York City on that day?

    We left the South Vietnamese to be slaughtered, imprisoned, and floating around the South China Sea, the Cambodians to the whims of a blood-thirsty tyrant. We left the Shi’ites hanging in 1991 while Hussein murdered them in droves, we left the Somalis in a lurch in 1993, we left the Haitians in as bad or worse condition than they were when Jimmy Carter went there to negotiate (not to mention we scooped up every Haitian we found floating in the Caribbean and stuck them in a Guantanamo tent city for indeterminate amount of time) and now Congress is doing it’s level best to broadcast to world that we’re about to abandon the Iraqis. Why won’t Pakistan do more to stop al Qaida operations in their country? Because they’re sure we’ll pull out before the job is done.

    Who could trust us? We don’t speak with one voice – we speak with millions of voices. Spiro Agnew called them the “nattering nabobs of negativity” and, boy, he nailed it. Free speech doesn’t extend to flocks of hypocrits negotiating our surrender.

    And a note to Blinky, Queen of Botox, Jimmy Carter’s endorsement of your “mission” to Syria in no way reflects favorably.  Although Hezbollah may name a rocket after you.

  • Veterans victims of neglect

    Not much in the news today, too many newspapers (and I heard Drudge yapping about it last night), the Washington Post, the Washington Times, specifically, are reporting that Hillary is out-raising all of the Presidential contenders. Why should anyone think that is news is beyond me. All of her friends are guilt-ridden millionaires. The best way to assuage guilt, for the Left anyway, is throw money at the candidate who promises to take money away from them to level that nebulous “playing field”. After all, the government knows best, right?

    Well, Cynthia Crossen has an historical account in today’s Wall Street Journal (it may require a subscription) of the veterans of WWI President Roosevelt shipped off to the Florida Keys to build the causeway there in 1934;

    They were troubled souls — misfits, roughnecks and roustabouts, many of them psychologically damaged and alcoholic. They were World War I veterans who couldn’t find their place in American society. In 1934, in the depths of the Depression, the federal government shipped hundreds of them to isolated work camps in Florida, out of sight and, thus, out of the newspapers.

    But the government inadvertently had sentenced many of these men, who had survived artillery shells, sniper fire and poison gas, to death in the Florida Keys.

    The story of how some 260 World War I veterans were killed by the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 is also a sorry tale of bureaucratic arrogance and bumbling — part of a long and continuing series of controversies surrounding the treatment of soldiers by Washington once their duty is done.

    In this case, the chain of responsibility for what Ernest Hemingway described as “manslaughter” began in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House and extended to the Florida statehouse, the National Weather Bureau and administrators of the three island work camps.

    You could probably draw two parallels to the events of today with the Washington Post’s Walter Reed fixation and the victims of Katrina – arguably all victims of uncaring government incompetence. But I think Americans can draw lessons that rang true in 1935 and in 2007. Pinning your life, your family and all your worldly possessions on the hope that government isn’t a pack of incompetent boobs is a fool’s errand.

    Anyone who has spent more than a minute in uniform knows that the government hardly knows you exists, and as long as they direct-deposit your pay check every month, you learn to adapt.

    Ms. Crossen continues with her story;

    Within a week, the federal and state governments and the American Legion had launched separate investigations. The finger-pointing began. Many people wanted to fix the blame on the Weather Bureau for its vague forecasts. But why hadn’t camp officials, who had been told by some longtime Keys residents that the men were in danger, ordered a train earlier? Why had the director of Florida’s work camps taken a two-hour lunch on Labor Day, during which he couldn’t be reached? Whose idea was it to put jerry-built camps in low-lying areas during hurricane season?

    Harry Hopkins, director of the Works Progress Administration, immediately sent a team to the Keys. “Washington bureaucrats may be mixing a viscous vat of whitewash,” commented a Miami newspaper. As one of the investigators, John J. Abt, later wrote, “We were on a political mission to defend the administration against charges of negligence. The investigation took all of a day.”

    The report, based on interviews with 16 people, ended: “To our mind the catastrophe must be characterized as ‘an act of God’ and was by its very nature beyond the power of man … to permit the taking of adequate precautions.”

    Investigators from the American Legion came to a different conclusion. The vets died because of the “inefficiency, indifference and ignorance” of camp administrators, they said.

    All of it sounds familiar, doesn’t it? You’d think we’d have all learned our lesson 70-odd years ago that government is not the solution to all of our problems – Hell, they’re probably not the solution to even some of our problems. So why are we so encouraged by candidates who promise to make our lives better? I’ll never understand.