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

Category: Politics

  • Judea Pearl speaks out

    Great opinion piece today by Judea Pearl who lost his son Daniel to Islamist extremists six years ago this week. Today he excoriates the media in the Wall Street Journal, The Daniel Pearl Standard;

    One of the things that saddens me most is that the press and media have had an active, perhaps even major role in fermenting hate and inhumanity. It was not religious fanaticism alone.

    This was first brought to my attention by the Pakistani Consul General who came to offer condolences at our home in California. When we spoke about the anti-Semitic element in Danny’s murder she said: “What can you expect of these people who never saw a Jew in their lives and who have been exposed, day and night, to televised images of Israeli soldiers targeting and killing Palestinian children.”

    At the time, it was not clear whether she was trying to exonerate Pakistan from responsibility for Danny’s murder, or to pass on the responsibility to European and Arab media for their persistent de-humanization of Jews, Americans and Israelis. The answer was unveiled in 2004, when a friend told me that photos of Muhammad Al Dura were used as background in the video tape of Danny’s murder.

    Al Dura, readers may recall, is the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who allegedly died from Israeli bullets in Gaza in September of 2001. As we now know, the whole scene is very likely to have been a fraud, choreographed by stringers and cameramen of France 2, the official news channel of France. France 2 aired the tape repeatedly and distributed it all over the world to anyone who needed an excuse to ratchet up anger or violence, among them Danny’s killers.

    The Pakistani Consul was right. The media cannot be totally exonerated from responsibility for Daniel’s murder, as well as for the “tsunami of hate” that has swept the world and continues to rise.

    We can toss in a few hundred other examples of that, too. Starting with “flushed Koran” story, the hundreds of staged photos that AP and Reuters have unashamedly posted around the world, the intentional exclusion of the terms “Arabic” or “Islamic” when describing criminal acts. Purposely avoiding the use of the word “terrorist” and replacing it with the more benign “militant” unwilling to make the distinction betweeen criminal acts and acts of liberation.

    Mr. Pearl mentions these, too;

    The press and media has indeed become more polarized and agenda-driven. Journalists today are pressured to serve the ideologies of those who pay their salaries or those who supply them with sources of information. CNN’s admission, in 2003, that it concealed information about the Iraqi regime in order to keep its office in Baghdad is a perfect example of this pressure. In the recent Gaza chaos, Western news agencies have willingly reported Hamas propaganda stunts as truth.

    Mr. Pearl recommends we use The Daniel Pearl Standard of selecting our media;

    …to distinguish true from false journalism, just choose any newspaper or TV channel and ask yourself when was the last time it ran a picture of a child, a grandmother or any empathy-evoking scene from the “other side” of a conflict.

    Of course, if everyone used that standard, there’d be no more media.

    Thanks to Bloodthirsty Liberal who pointed out that Judea Pearl is Daniel Pearl’s father and not his wife, saving me some measure of embarrassment..

  • The legacy of George Bush

    Yesterday, I was completely enthralled with a post on The Anchoress about George Bush’s legacy. It’s probably not what most Conservatives would say about him, let alone the Left, but it’s pretty much what I’ve been saying all along;

    Perhaps I am a dim bulb, but President Bush has never surprised me, and that is probably why I have never felt let down or “betrayed” by him. He is, in essentials, precisely who he has ever been. He did not surprise me when he managed, in August of 2001, to find a morally workable solution in the matter of Embryonic Stem Cells. He did not surprise me when, a month later, he stood on a pile of rubble and lifted a broken city from its knees. When my FDNY friends told me of the enormous consolation and strength he brought to his meetings with grieving families, I was not surprised. When the World Series opened in New York City and the President was invited to throw the first pitch, there was no surprise in his throwing (while wearing body armor) a perfect strike.

    […]

    Let me tell you what has surprised me about George W. Bush. I have been surprised by his ability to keep from attacking-in-kind the “public servants” in Washington who – for five years – have not been able to speak of the American President with the respect he is due, by virtue of both his office and his humanity, because they are entralled with hate and owned by opportunism. I have been surprised that he has kept his committment to “changing the tone” even when it has long been clear that the only way the tone in Washington will ever change is if everyone named Bush or Clinton or Kennedy is cleared out and “career politicians” are shown the door….

    Now, I don’t pray at the altar of George Bush or pray in the direction of the White House, but you have to give the man his due, and I think The Anchoress has done that. Whether you agree with his policies or not, he told what he was going to do before you voted for him, didn’t he? Because he told us what he believed in that first election, nothing he did surprised us – except that he kept his word. How unpolitician-like.

    He said he’d never govern by polls, and by-God he hasn’t. He put his head down and plowed through the nattering nabobs of negativity (h/t Spiro Agnew) and did what he thought was right regardless of the cacophony of the dissenters – on both sides. We’d have gotten the same kind of determination from Fred Thompson, I think, but that ship has sailed apparently.
    More praise for George Bush is published in, of all places, the Washington Post, this morning (I can only imagine the comments that’ll appear there before the end of the day) written by Michael Gerson;

    Proposals such as No Child Left Behind, the AIDS and malaria initiatives, and the addition of a prescription drug benefit to Medicare would simply not have come from a traditional conservative politician. They became the agenda of a Republican administration precisely because of Bush’s persistent, passionate advocacy. To put it bluntly, these would not have been the priorities of a Cheney administration.

    This leaves critics of the Bush administration with a “besides” problem. Bush is a heartless and callous conservative, “besides” the 1.4 million men, women and children who are alive because of treatment received through his AIDS initiative . . . “besides” the unquestioned gains of African American and Hispanic students in math and reading . . . “besides” 32 million seniors getting help to afford prescription drugs, including 10 million low-income seniors who get their medicine pretty much free. Iraq may have overshadowed these achievements; it does not eliminate them.

    Conservatives have been dealt cards which are Socialist in nature. If we want the big ticket items (National Security, sane economic policy, etc…) we have to pay for the things that are aptly named “entitlements” that Democrats have used to pay for votes for decades and the victims of our public school system have come to expect. Until we either change the culture or accept the fact that we don’t want to have Conservatives in public office, that’s the price we have to pay – it’s called accepting reality.

    Gerson continues;

    Bush has received little attention or thanks for his compassionate reforms. This is less a reflection on him than on the political challenge of compassionate conservatism. The conservative movement gives the president no credit because it views all these priorities — foreign assistance, a federal role in education, the expansion of an entitlement — as heresies, worthy of the stake. Liberals and Democrats offer no praise because a desire to help dying Africans, minority students and low-income seniors does not fit the image of Bush’s cruelty that they wish to cultivate.

    In the January 30th edition of The Weekly Standard, Joseph Loconte writes about Bush’ success in Africa against AIDS;

    “Protecting our nation from the dangers of a new century requires more than good intelligence and a strong military,” Bush said. “It also requires changing the conditions that breed resentment and allow extremists to prey on despair. So America is using its influence to build a freer, more hopeful, and more compassionate world.” Under PEPFAR, about 1.4 million
    AIDS patients in 15 nations in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean have received life-saving medicines. Bush announced Monday night that he intended to add another $30 billion to the program over the next five years.

    Many on the left, at home and abroad, have reproached the president for his alleged failure to use “soft power” to confront religious extremism and advance U.S. foreign policy goals. Yet here is a supremely humane initiative – inconceivable to foreign policy realists – linked to U.S. security concerns. Bush rightly calls it “a reflection of our national interest and the calling of our conscience.” Just think about the number of AIDS orphans that would be scratching for survival without PEPFAR. Millions of rootless young boys cannot be a good thing for any society. Whatever the relationship between poverty and terrorism, this program is probably doing more to check the flow of terrorist recruits than all the diplomatic bloviating in Brussels, Geneva, and New York put together.

    Either way he’s screwed, at least by the voices on both extreme ends of the political spectrum. A man who has always been true to his word, who kept his campaign promises, ignored the loudest noisemakers – quite refreshing considering his predecessor and the alternate choices we had in 2000 and 2004.

    History will be more kind to him than his current critics. Especially if we get a Clinton or Obama term to compare to Bush’s.

  • Carter = Obama

    Jimmy Carter gushed over the Barack Obama campaign in an interview with the Wall Street journal‘s Douglas Blackmon today;

    “Obama’s campaign has been extraordinary and titillating for me and my family,” Mr. Carter said. The 83-year-old former president, who left the White House in 1981, compared Mr. Obama’s speeches to those of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and said he believed the candidate could carry some southern states if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

    […]

    Mr. Carter said he has had limited direct contact with Mr. Obama but has been particularly impressed with the candidate’s recent public appearances. “The speech he made after Iowa and the speech he made the other night after South Carolina are equal in eloquence to Martin Luther King Jr.,” Mr. Carter said. “He has an extraordinary oratory … I think that Obama will be almost automatically a healing factor in the animosity now that exists, that relates to our country and its government.”

    When has Jimmy Carter ever been right about anything?

    Well, yeah, because Obama is Jimmy Carter revisited. Carter was a one-term governor from Georgia with no experience who won because of a Republican Party that couldn’t get it’s message straight. Carter lied (he promised that he’d never turn the Panama Canal over to the Panamanians – a huge issue of the day), he used race in his campaign (he told the white Southern voters that he supported “ethnically pure neighborhoods), and all he offered us was pretty, empty words. Like Obama. But, carter proved that he’s an empty suit like Obama – he’s impressed with Obama’s public appearances – not with his policies or what he’s accomplished since going to the Senate.

    Another guy who did a lot of research on the comparison is Carl in Jerusalem at Israel Matzav;

    One thing Carter did not have was foreign policy expertise. As a result, he relied on his foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (who was a partner in a major New York law firm) and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor at Columbia University. The results were disastrous. Under Carter, the US allowed the Shah of Iran to fall and the Islamist Ayatollahs to take over. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Carter sent aid to the anti-Soviet Islamists. He drastically slashed support for South Korea. These policies are still causing repercussions thirty years later with Iran and North Korea both developing nuclear weapons and al-Qaeda being based in Afghanistan.

    […]

    Carter is the archetype for Barack Hussein Obama, now the front runner for the Democratic nomination. Like Carter, Obama is an unknown who has come out of nowhere. Like Carter, Obama is a creature of the leftist media. Like Carter, Obama is relatively young (he’s 47 years old – Carter was 52). Obama is a first-term Senator from the State of Illinois. That’s right – he was elected to the Senate in 2004 and started serving in January 2005, just three years ago. But here’s the key to why Obama is like Carter: Three years in the Senate, even as a member of the foreign relations committee, does not give one the experience to run the country’s foreign relations. So Obama, like Carter before him, will be dependent upon his foreign policy advisers at a crucial time for both the US and Israel. Without his advisers, Obama has no clue how to set a foreign policy agenda.

    So there’s our choices for a Democrat president. We can have the corrupt, backbiting, polarizing administration of the Clintons, or the Barney Fife bumbling of Jimmy Carter’s Administration.

  • Our shrinking rebates

    Well, back two weeks ago I wrote that President Bush recommended that Congress rebate taxpayers $800. Last week, the House of Representatives cut that amount to $600 so they could give money to people who don’t have any taxable income (effectively negating the meaning of “rebate”). Today in the Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Lueck, writes that the now the Senate has sunk their hungry gums around our rebate, too;

    Sen. Baucus proposed a $500 rebate for people who report at least $3,000 of income on a 2007 tax return, including Social Security income, as well as wages, a move that would provide rebates to millions of seniors not eligible under the House compromise. Married couples would be eligible to receive $1,000. He also revived a top Democratic priority — an extension of unemployment-insurance benefits — that was dropped from the House plan.

    So, in just two weeks time, the rebate of our money that we earned and gave to the government has been slashed 37.5% . A married couple expecting $1600 from President Bush will be getting $1000 from Baucus instead.

    Doing what the Left do best – be so fair to everyone that everyone ends up with scraps. Spreading out the misery in equal doses. And being so slow about it, that by the time the checks the mailboxes, this latest “crisis” will be over.
    Jeffery Birnbaum in the Washington Post writes that the K Street lobbyists couldn’t muster their forces soon enough to tear the rebates up for the special interests, so they’re focusing on the Senate;

    Other interests are bearing down on Baucus and his committee as well. Late last week, Baucus and his staff met with representatives of organized labor, including Rod Bennett and Donald J. Kaniewski of the Laborers’ International Union, Christopher D. Heinz of the carpenters union and the building trades department of the AFL-CIO, and Jeffrey Soth of the International Union of Operating Engineers.

    A tax rebate for low- and middle-income workers — a foundation of the stimulus package — “is good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough,” said Bill Samuel, legislative director of the AFL-CIO. Yesterday, in fact, the finance panel released its proposal, which adopted an important request from organized labor. It would extend unemployment benefits by 13 weeks, among other additions to the president’s package.

    Except that’s not AFL-CIO’s money. It’s our money – us – the American taxpayers.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that those crooked-ass insurance brokers at the AARP are licking their lips, too;

    The AARP, an advocacy group for retired people, has pushed for the elderly to be included. But “it’s going to be hard to get people to take advantage of it,” said David Certner of AARP, if they don’t normally file tax returns.

    Well, numbnuts, if they don’t pay taxes, they don’t get a rebate. How hard is that to understand?

    But it’s part of a larger problem. Americans are convinced that all money belongs to the government and we only get to keep what they let us have. Every once in a while they throw us a bone, and we clap like a room full of retarded children because we get to keep our shiny toys for a little while longer.

    So here we sit like a bunch of birdlings waiting for the government to come by and drop some worm ooze in our open mouths – if the vultures from the special interests don’t get to the worm first.

  • Jabba the Kennedy endorses Obama

    Ted Kennedy Press Conference

    So after sitting on pins and needles since yesterday, while word leaked out everywhere, we finally learn that Jabba the Kennedy endorses *shockah* a Democrat. (LA Times link);

    Declaring that “it is time for a new generation of leadership” in America, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president Monday, wrapping the young politician in the mantle of America’s best-known political dynasty.

    He was joined in a cavernous gymnasium at American University here by his niece Caroline and his son, Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, both of whom also threw their support behind the youthful Illinois senator. They likened Obama to their best-loved relative, President Kennedy.

    “With every person he meets, every crowd he inspires, and everyone he touches,” Sen. Kennedy said, Obama “generates new hope that our greatest days as a nation are still ahead, and this generation of Americans, like others before us, can unite to meet our own rendezvous with destiny.”

    I can just see the hearts floating around that gymnasium. Gateway Pundit and Jammie Wearing Fool have all of the relevant links. Blue Star Chronicles and Bob’s Blog has the video. Michele Malkin live blogs the press conference;

    Kennedy just referred to the “better angels of our nature.” Again: What would he know about that?

    My eyes. My ears.

    Geoffrey Dickens at Newsbusters guages media drooling;

    Chris Matthews compared Kennedy to King Arthur and said of the liberal Senator’s speech: “Today we got a glimpse of the early 1960s when politics was alive.” The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson admitted it gave him “goose-bumps,” and MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle called it “electric.”

    From Sister Toldjah; Former Clinton fan, Toni Morrison, throws Hillary under the bus for Obama – skin pigment is thicker than pointless blather, I suppose.

    Redstate catches NOW feminists angry at Teddy (no not for murdering a woman);

    Why?

    Because Hillary is a woman and she therefore deserves the endorsement. Check out the letter:

    But Hot Air reports that the NOW president in New York called it a psychological gang bang of Hillary. Too many visuals for me to be comfortable discussing that one.

    My cousin, Scott, just emailed me this;

    GlubGlub-1.JPG

  • Thoughts on counter protests

    This guy is an unashamed Leftist. He’s proudly chanting away with his friends in front of the Israeli Embassy on Friday afternoon. After a half hour of repeating “Liars, liars, occupiers” and “End Zionist apartheid”, he got sick of being harangued from fifty-feet away by counterprotesters. He marched his pudgy, pasty butt over to a poor policewoman and demanded that she take control of the situation.

    He told her she should moderate the protest – that first one side should get the opportunity to shout bumpersticker slogans, and then they’d shut up while the other side had their opportunity to be heard. It was really quite a pathetic request. He even went so far as to suggest that the counterprotesters were rude for interrupting the Jew haters’ protest. One of the Jewish students with whom I stood that frigid afternoon called him “their Jimmy Carter”.

    Before this princely fellow made his suggestion, someone had approached the counterprotesters and asked if they could turn down the volume on the bullhorn. Luckily there was only one volume setting – loud.

    Although counterprotests aren’t a new phenomena, they are more frequently attended these days. And the Left is having trouble dealing with that. Cindy Sheehan wouldn’t get out of her car last summer when faced with counterprotesters in Virginia, Code Pink demanded police protection in Miami when Cuban-American counterprotesters curtailed their little theater on Calle Ocho this month. The presence of Gathering of Eagles, Move America Forward and other organizations at ANSWER and IVAW protests, which have been relatively unopposed until recently, has driven the Left’s attendance numbers down.

    I know that Free Republic and Protest Warrior have always had a presence at these events, but turn out has been relatively low. The Left has always been able to laugh these groups off. But those groups have provided a catalyst for larger, more mainstream counterprotests and protesters are concerned that maybe they aren’t the voice of the majority after all. After having enjoyed sole proprietorship of the bullhorn for decades, they are facing extinction and irrelevance.

    I’ve been to many of the protests back to 1999 when I first moved to the DC area and I’ve seen the rise of attendance up until last January’s anti-war demonstration when they peaked. During that protest, there was a small crowd of counterprotesters at the National Archives building. The next protest was the “march on the Pentagon” in Marhc. the protesters were shocked that counter protesters probably equalled the number of protesters and lined both sides of the march route. In September, protesters denied there was a significant presence of counterprotesters, but bothsides of Pennsylvania AVeue was lined with counterprotesters from the White House to the Capitol. That’s pretty significant.

    I can say with some certainty, but no real evidence, that counterprotests have had an effect on the debate in this country and I hope they continue.

  • Sufficient Calibers

    I stumbled across this and had to share it:

    Sufficient Calibers
    emblem

    Retired Army Green Beret Smokey Taylor was court martialed this weekend, and came away feeling good about it. Taylor, at age 80 the oldest member of Chapter XXXIII of the Special Forces Association, was on mock trial by his peers under the charge of “Failing to use a weapon of sufficient caliber” in the shooting of an intruder at his home in Knoxville, Tennesee, in December.The entire affair, of course, was very much tongue in cheek. Taylor had been awakened in the early morning hours of Dec. 17, 2007, when an intruder broke into his home. He investigated the noises with one of his many weapons in hand. When the intruder threatened him with a knife, Taylor warned him, then brought his .22 caliber pistol to bear and shot him right between the eyes.
    More Here

    A couple of cardinal rules were broken here:
    #1 Never bring a knife to a gunfight.
    #2 Never enter into a gunfight with a caliber that doesn’t start with a 4.
    #3 Aim center mass!

  • Chavez; Columbia US Pawn

    Photo from Reuters

    So Coke-chewing Hugo Chavez’ cheese slid off his cracker-again-as he accused Columbia and the United States of plotting against him-again-according to a Miami Herald article;

    President Hugo Chávez on Friday accused neighboring Colombia and the United States of plotting a military ‘’aggression’’ against Venezuela.

    ‘’I accuse the government of Colombia of devising a conspiracy, acting as a pawn of the U.S. empire, of devising a military provocation against Venezuela,’’ Chávez said.

    ‘’A military aggression is being prepared,’’ Chávez added. He did not offer evidence to support his claim.

    But he warned Colombia not to attempt a ‘’provocation’’ and said Venezuela would cut off all oil exports in the event of a military strike from the neighboring country.

    ‘’In that scenario, write it down: The price of oil would reach $300, because there wouldn’t be oil for anyone,’’ Chávez said. “The invaders would have to step over our dead bodies.’’

    Well, that’s a way to rally the people around you – promise them that they’d die before Chavez would allow himself to be killed. He’s beginning to sound like another former Latin American leader who dared to stand up to the United States by hiding behind his pueblo.

    In the meantime, The Devil’s Excrement is reporting that on of the Chavez-hired thugs in the Maleta-gate investigation has changed his plea to guilty of intimidating a US witness in the case;

    Moises Maionica one of the men charged in the US with being an agent of the Venezuelan Government in US territory in the Maletagate scandal, changed his plea to guilty in a sign that he is now coopertaing with US authorities. Immediately the Venezuelan Foreign Minister said Maionica was lying through his teeth in declaring himself guilty. Maionica was facing 15 years in jail if found guilty after declaring himself innocent, but has probably changed his plea now in exchange for immunity and reportedly, a US visa.

    Daniel at Venezuela News and Views says this won’t affect Chavez much in Venezuela but impacts his world-wide image;

    In Venezuela Chavez has little to fear. After all the judicial system is now inexistent and certainly not about to investigate Chavez on anything. No matter what the trials of Miami in the coming months might reveal, we can be assured that the most that will happen will be a delightfully botched operation such as the one on the Danilo Anderson assassination. That one lead to nowhere, though ensuring that at least a few political opponents were put in trouble for nothing, one still in exile. No, even if there were to be a judge willing to take on Chavez, or at least his corrupt camarilla, even if the other 3 in Miami were to plead guilty now and start talking, Chavez has much worse problems than Antonini to face anyway.

    Because the HMS-Chavez seems to make water from all sides these days.

    First, at least for Chavez, his foreign policy front, the only aspect of his rule that he really cares about, is collapsing right and left.

    And that probably explains his macho muscle flexing in public. Katy at Caracas Chronicles says he has domestic problems, too;

    However, I get the feeling that the government is slowly entering into panic mode. Increasingly, the tone I get – from the scandals, from what bureaucrats are saying in public, from what chavista talking heads say on the air – is that the revolution is in trouble, perhaps more trouble than we on the other side acknowledge.

    Repeated defeats at the hand of chavismo have taught us not to have high expectations. But it’s hard to shake the sense that chavistas are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

    Gustavo Coronel at Las Armas de Coronel writes that the state-run oil company, PDVSA, is failing at producing and exporting oil, but they’ve switched gears into importing food stuffs;

    PDVSA’s oil production has declined by some 800,000 barrels per day during the last seven years and it will inevitably keep declining, as investments are significantly below requirements. This means that oil exports, the economic lifeline of Venezuela, have also been declining, not only because production is down but also because domestic consumption is sharply up. Meanwhile PDVSA, led by the future liberator of Bolivia, Rafael Ramirez, has opened a new division called PDVAL, PDVSA Alimentos, to import food (faster than producing it). The opening of this new division has been a major event in the State of Zulia. It is born, says Ramirez, “to solve the problems of supply of basic foods, in answer to the existing situation of hoarding, contraband and detour of products”

    So, the logical solution is to blame the US and Columbia, well…logical from a completely whacked out perspective, anyway. Hugo, why do you think they call it “dope”, compa?