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

Category: Media

  • Iraqis want a time schedule for withdrawal?

    That’s what you’d believe after a cursory glance at this story in the Washington Post this morning. Under the headline “Iraqi Lawmakers Back Bill on US Withdrawal“, the Post announces;

    A majority of members of Iraq’s parliament have signed a draft bill that would require a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq and freeze current troop levels. The development was a sign of a growing division between Iraq’s legislators and prime minister that mirrors the widening gulf between the Bush administration and its critics in Congress.

    Oh, my! Then why are we there, if the Iraqis don’t want us there? But, wait! Read a few paragraphs down to;

    “We haven’t asked for the immediate withdrawal of multinational forces; we asked that we should build our security forces and make them qualified, and at that point there would be a withdrawal,” said Bahaa al-Araji, a member of parliament allied with the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters drafted the bill. “But no one can accept the occupation of his country.”

    (Emphasis mine)

    Oh, well, that’s no shocker that Mookey (Butterball) al-Sadr wants a time-scheduled withdrawal, is it? That way he can rest his militia up on the French Riviera and then have them locked and loaded when the last C130 leaves Baghdad airport.

    So what’s the Washington Post trying to pull here? I guess they’re running a screen for the Democrats – the Democrats know that if they keep sending pre-vetoed legislation to the president, they’ll start looking like Gingrich’s Republicans in the 90s when they tried to force Clinton to spend responsibly and the public will start blaming Democrats for prolonging the war.

    In comes the pinch-hitting press to cover for the Democrats. Take the heat off the Democrats by implying that the Iraqis support a timed withdrawal – and try to keep from mentioning al Sadr who has called the presence of American an occupation.

    Nice try, WaPo.

  • Take THAT Code Pink and Cindy Sheehan

    I don’t usually post more article than commentary, but this story says it all.

    John Ward in the Washington Times writes about the pen President Bush used yesterday to veto the Democrats’ cobbled-together, pork-laden defense spending bill – otherwise known as the Capitulation Proclamation; 

        The pen was a gift from the father of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, who asked Mr. Bush last month to use it when he vetoed a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq.
        Robert Derga, of Uniontown, Ohio, gave Mr. Bush the pen after an April 16 speech by the president at the White House.
        Mr. Bush invited a number of “Gold Star Families” — families who have lost a U.S. military member in Iraq — to the speech, and met with them afterwards in the Oval Office.
    * * * * *

     “I looked the president square in the eye,” Mr. Derga said. “I looked at him and said, ‘Mr. President, if this Iraq supplemental comes down to a veto I want you to use my pen to do it.’”
        Mr. Bush “kind of looked at me funny for a moment and then said, ‘Absolutely,’ and then handed the pen to his assistant,” Mr. Derga said.
        “He assured me he would use it,” Mr. Derga said.
    * * * * *

      Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Derga was shutting off his computer at work, around 5:30, when he received a call from Jared Weinstein, Mr. Bush’s personal aide.
        Mr. Weinstein was calling “to tell me that the president had signed the veto with my pen.”
        “They wanted to again give their heartfelt condolences on our loss of Dustin,” Mr. Derga said. “I was pretty blown away is one way of putting it. I couldn’t believe he actually did it.”

    I thought it was more than appropriate. Please read the rest of the story for more background.

    UPDATE: The Washington Post is running the same story in an Anne Flaherty-written AP story – well sorta. You have to plow through a page-and-a-half of anti-Bush blather until you reach a two-paragraph blurb followed by;

    Minutes after Bush vetoed the bill, an anti-war demonstrator stood outside the White House with a bullhorn: “How many more must die? How many more must die?”

    Then another page-and-a-half of anti-Bush blather. But, there’s no bias in the media.

  • Left’s new conniption fit (Updated)

    This afternoon Rupert Murdoch made a $5 billion bid for the Dow Jones Company which owns the Wall Street Journal. The Dow Jones Co.  stock shot up from $35/share to $55 in about two minutes after the bid. In fact before this bid, the stock had languished between $32 and $40 for years.

    Just as quickly as the stock spiked higher, Bernie Sanders (Communist-VT) shot to the nearest CNBC microphone to tell Larry Kudlow that Murdoch’s owning the Wall Street Journal would violate the Fairness Doctrine that Sanders is trying to get reinstituted into law. I think that’s a stretch.

    Murdoch owns local newspapers, a broadcast TV network and a cable news channel – no national newspapers like the Wall Street Journal. One of the Leftists on Kudlow’s show claimed that Murdoch would ruin the WSJ like he did with the Times of London (his words not mine – I have no idea how good or bad the Times does it’s business).

    Murdoch would be a fool to tinker with the internals of the extremely successful WSJ – besides it’s editorial and commentary pages are already fairly conservative. What could Murdoch do to make it moreso that frightens the Left so much?

    The Bancroft family, which holds a slim majority of the stock that controls the Dow Jones Company, have said they won’t sell, so the whole deal may fall through, but Murdoch is a pretty tenacious little Aussie. He probably wants the WSJ to bolster his planned Fox Business Channel venture and to cripple CNBC which has a colaborative agreement with the WSJ and it’s accompanying journalists.

    The Wall Street Journal is probably the most successful news organization in the country and their internet presence is unmatched – despite the fact that they’re one of the few who successfully charge a subscription fee. I’ve been a subscriber for years because, as a source, they are unimpeachable and they just have news and commentary not available anywhere else.

    I just about spit my chocolate milk out when Bill Press, on Kudlow and Company blurted out that Murdoch wanted WSJ so he could compete with the New York Times. Who wants to compete with that fat whale? That’d be like buying the Baltimore Ravens to compete with the Washington Redskins.

    But Press went on to condemn Murdoch and his News Corp. empire as a vast right wing conspiracy (oblivious, apparently to the Leftist media in this country).

    Now I don’t know if Murdoch’s latest acquisition is legal or ethical, I just know that if it gets the Left (especially Press and Sanders) in a lather, it must be good for the country. To quote Montgomery Burns on Rupert Murdoch, “He’s one beautiful man.”

    UPDATE: CNBC is totally freaking out this (Wednesday) morning over this story. Carlos Quintanilla began his “Squawk Box” show (ostensibly about the markets) by calling the bid “Rupert Murdoch’s lastest bid for world conquest” with a backdrop of the scene from Star Wars of Darth Vader light-saber fencing with Luke Skywalker. He’s apparently convinced that the WSJ will become a right-wing newspaper. What the Hell is the Wall Street Journal now? Leftwing? F’pete’s sake.

  • No bias in the media

    Just minding my own business, reading today’s news and I stopped dead at this quote in a Jennifer Loven-written article for the AP in the Washington Examiner;

    Bush’s appearance came exactly four years after his speech on an aircraft carrier decorated with a huge “Mission Accomplished” banner. In that address, a frequent target of Democrats seeking to ridicule the president, he declared that the Iraq front in the global fight against terrorism had been successfully completed.

    “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” the president said from the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, just weeks after the war began. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

    At the time, Bush’s approval rating was 63 percent, with the public’s disapproval at 34 percent.

    Four years later, with over 3,300 U.S. troops killed in Iraq and the country gripped by unrelenting violence and political uncertainty, only 35 percent of the public approves of the job the president is doing, while 62 percent disapprove, according to an April 2-4 poll from AP-Ipsos.

    Yup a one-line quote from the President’s speech followed by approval/disapproval ratings. Just reading that quote, you’d think the President had declared the war over. Now, my memory is failing me a bit sometimes, but I’d have sworn that he said more than that.

    Sure enough, from the White House website I found the transcript of the President’s speech that day;

    We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people.

    The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

    Funny, sounds to me like the President was warning us that the war isn’t over – that it’d take years for our work in Iraq to end. It almost sounds as if he wasn’t saying “Mission Accomplished” at all.

    From Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post the same line with the same type of commentary;

    Four years ago today, Bush flew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier in “Top Gun” style, stood under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished,” and proudly declared: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

    The event was initially hailed as a brilliant act of White House stagecraft, showcasing Bush as a powerful and resolute leader.

    But as time passed, the “mission” was exposed as a delusion. There were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And there is little sense of accomplishment.

    Funny, but I don’t see the words “Mission Accomplished” in the speech. I know the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln hung a banner on their ship that proclaimed that their mission had been accomplished in Iraq and the President welcomed them home, but I don’t see anyplace where the president was anything except proud of the job this crew and the forces in general had done.

    Froomkin also misses the mark on weapons of mass destruction, too. You’d think he’d not want to show us his ass on such an easily researched point. But the “No WMDs” meme is just spit out reflexively these days. yeah, there is a lot less there than we thought, but it was there nonetheless, Dan. And if you count what we got off the Arab Street from Libya as a reaction to our invasion of Hussein’s Iraq, it starts to add up.

    “We have difficult work to do” and “…will take time” tells me that the President was being nothing short of candid and honest with the American people. But it seems to me that Jennifer Loven and Dan Froomkin are falling short of being candid and honest with their readers. 

  • The Self-fulfilling Prophecy

    I’ve been saying for years that this war in Iraq has dragged on because of the anti-war Democrats incessant yapping and the media’s focus on troops’ injuries instead of their accomplishments. The proof comes this month. While the Washington Post dances a jig over the 100 casualties of the past month, do they for one minute wonder why?

    The deaths of more than 100 American troops in April made it the deadliest month so far this year for U.S. forces in Iraq, underscoring the growing exposure of Americans as thousands of reinforcements arrive for an 11-week-old offensive to tame sectarian violence.

    More than 60 Iraqis also were killed or found dead across Iraq on Monday. Casualties among Iraqi civilians and security forces have outstripped those of Americans throughout the war. In March, a total of 2,762 Iraqi civilians and policemen were killed, down 4 percent from the previous month, when 2,864 were killed. Iraq’s government has yet to release any monthly totals for April.

    Of course, it’s Bush’s fault for sending more troops into the fray. I guess it couldn’t be because the enemy sees an opportunity to influence US policy by making the president look bad while he vetoes the corruption-ridden defense spending bill, could it? I guess it’d be too honest to posit an alternate scenario to the readers instead of the intellectually vacant “more troops=more casualties”.

    Why would I think such a thing?

    Highlighting the vulnerability of American forces, a series of explosions Monday night rocked Baghdad’s Green Zone, the most heavily secured enclave in the capital and home to thousands of U.S. troops, Western diplomats and Iraqi government officials.

    Hmmmm, the night before the President gets the bill from Congress, the Green Zone gets mortared. Just a coincidence? Especially since the enemy knows there are fewer troops in the Green Zone last night than there were a month ago. Naw, it’s just a publicity stunt by the enemy to make the American public think they’re as strong as ever.

    And the media is going along with it – just like they did during the ’68 Tet battle that reduced the Viet Cong to an ineffective fighting force for the remainder of the war in Vietnam, but strengthened them PR-wise when Walter Cronkite and the rest of the press declared the war lost.

    A logical person would notice that al-Sadr came out of hiding in Iran for a moment or two to urge his Mahdi army to attack Americans just as the debate in Congress was starting to go his way just weeks after the surge began and forced al-Sadr to seek refuge in Iran. Think the Washington Post could notice that for a minute?

    The Post isn’t the only one. AP is positively giddy about numbers, too. And they arrive at the same conclusion as the Post;

       All but one of the latest U.S. deaths occurred in Baghdad, where a nearly 11-week security crackdown has put thousands of additional American soldiers on the streets — making them targets for both Shi’ite and Sunni extremists.

    It’s just easier to spew out cause-effect theories supported by shallow interpretations of the numbers rather than admit that the monkey-shines of Pelosi, Murtha, Reid Schumer, et al. are the real cause.

    Monkeyshines like what S.A. Miller is reporting in the Washington Times this morning;

       House Democrats are expected to attempt to override the veto this week, although they likely are at least 70 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to succeed. The failure of the House vote would make a Senate action unnecessary because both chambers are needed to defeat a veto. 

    To me, this means that Democrats are absolutely out of ideas. They could have spent the last month reworking their bill and presenting the new work to the President, but instead they keep beating the same drum knowing it’s a failure. Too bad the Democrats can’t be this persistant when it comes to our national security. 

    That’s OK, because as I’ve said countless times before, the Left and it’s willing accomplices in the media will pay a price eventually for their behavior – just like the price they paid after Vietnam. They’ll all go down in history as the punchline of some hillariouos joke.

  • 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. 

  • Army told “Hurry up and wait”

    Now all of the Democrats who whined so loudly and so long about the condition of OUTPATIENT facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center are trying to block the expansion of facilities at Bethesda Naval Hospital to accomodate the Walter Reed move. According to Steve Vogel of the Washington Post;

    A review panel’s recommendation that the Pentagon accelerate the expansion of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda drew a wary reaction yesterday from local officials and neighbors concerned about traffic problems.

    * * * * *

    The report says the Pentagon should speed up the 2005 decision by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission to consolidate medical care at the Bethesda facility. It recommends that money to break ground for the expansion be released as soon as possible and that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates “accelerate or waive” an environmental study being conducted by the Navy.

    But Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who represents Montgomery County in Congress, said yesterday, “We shouldn’t be cutting any corners.

    “Some people are saying let’s slam on the brakes; others are saying we should hit the accelerator,” Van Hollen said. “I think we should proceed in a deliberate way.”

    Yes, that’s my Congressman. He’s quick to hit at the Bush Administration, but slow to act in the interests of our nation and our troops.  A few weeks ago, the troops were a “priority”, now the priority is the poor dregs who’ll be stuck in traffic on Wisconsin Avenue because they’re too damn lazy to take the bus or the subway to work.

    But he’s not the only one. Jim “Fighting Drunk” Moran;

    But some members of Congress, including Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), insist that Walter Reed be kept open. “What you’re doing is changing horses in the middle of the stream at a time when soldiers need the best medical care,” Moran said yesterday.

    According to what Democrats were saying a few weeks ago, that’s what they wanted to happen – they wanted to change horses in mid-stream.

    And from the ugliest woman to walk the floor of the Senate;

    Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) also expressed concern about closing Walter Reed, “given the current strain on patient care for our soldiers.”

    So let me get this right – Democrats want everything to change for the troops, except everything must remain the same. This is classic Democrat double talk. they’ve done the same thing on the war, on education, on welfare reform, on Social Security, on nearly every issue before them. They want everything done yesterday – but only as long as nothing changes.

    So why do the Democrats want to slow down on Walter Reed? Because the District stands to lose 6,000 jobs when the medical facility moves 10 miles away to Bethesda (keep in mind driving ten miles through the District and southern Maryland can take two hours depending on the time of day). Most of those jobs are menial kitchen and jantorial labor. There’s nothing in that area to attract businesses that could replace such an employer.

    The District wants the Army to just turn over the buildings to the city, so the city can turn the buildings, which are too dilapidated for outpatients, into low-rent apartments so the District can have some more slums to warehouse the il-educated denizens of DC. At this time the Army is resisting that plan – so Demorats are waiting for a friendlier administration that will let them become the Mid-Atlantic’s slum lords. 

    Read all of the Washington Post’s genuine frontpage concern for the troops here, before the Democrats started stonewalling the process and got this particular story moved to page 3 while the frontpage is reserved for really important stuff like Rove’s missing emails and FEMA’s wasted food.