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

Category: Politics

  • Ghoulish candidates wave Bhutto’s bloody blouse

    Bezir Bhutto’s body hadn’t reached room temperature yesterday before Clinton and Obama seized on her death for political opportunism (Washington Post link);

    For [Obama’s] chief rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Bhutto’s death helped underscore the line she has been driving home for months — about who is best suited to lead the nation at a time of international peril. In her comments Thursday, Clinton described Bhutto in terms Obama (D-Ill.) could not: as a fellow mother, a pioneering woman following in a man’s footsteps, and a longtime peer on the world stage.

    The differing reactions of Clinton and Obama to the assassination crystallized the debate between the two just a week before Iowans will decide the first contest in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

    While aides said Clinton was anxious not to appear to be politicizing Bhutto’s death, they nonetheless saw it as a potential turning point in the race with Obama and former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.).

    Everything seems to be a potential campaign issue these days, but it’s completely tasteless to prop up a dead body, Bernie-like, and campaign from behind it. And I’m stupefied that Clinton thinks the murder of one woman politician gives her any kind of moral authority or proves her ability to be President. Clinton came close to  announcing that Bhutto would be her running mate;

    “I have known Benazir Bhutto for more than 12 years; she’s someone whom I was honored to visit as first lady when she was prime minister,” Clinton said at a campaign event in a firehouse in western Iowa. “Certainly on a personal level, for those of us who knew her, who were impressed by her commitment, her dedication, her willingness to pick up the mantle of her father, who was also assassinated, it is a terrible, terrible tragedy,” she said.

    Sweetness and Light chronicles Clinton’s lies about her relationship with Bhutto. And Obama blamed Bhutto’s death on Clinton;

    Three hours after news of Bhutto’s slaying broke, Obama delivered a withering rebuke of Clinton’s experience, depicting her lengthy political resume` as a hindrance to solving big problems, including crises abroad. In an especially charged moment, senior Obama adviser David Axelrod would later tie the killing to the Iraq war — and Clinton’s vote to approve it, which he argued diverted U.S resources from fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both al-Qaeda hotbeds.

    “You can’t at once argue that you’re the master of a broken system in Washington and offer yourself as the person to change it,” Obama said. “You can’t fall in line behind the conventional thinking on issues as profound as war and offer yourself as the leader who is best prepared to chart a new and better course for America.”

    The Wall Street Journal reports that somehow Clinton and Richardson think their time milling around the White House gives them experience;

    Sen. Clinton, who had planned to talk about housing and the economy at a rally in Lawton, Iowa, shifted to condemn the assassination, to recall Ms. Bhutto as someone she had known personally since the late 1980s, and to stress the need for “picking a president who is ready on day one, who is ready to deal with the myriad of problems.”

    Democrat Bill Richardson, the New Mexico governor who has boasted of his experience as President Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, had the most muscular reaction. He called on President Bush to suspend military aid to Pakistan and “press Musharraf to step aside” in favor of a new coalition government, because he has failed to hunt down terrorists and had destabilized the country by “his attempts to cling to power.” Mr. Richardson also scheduled a speech for today in Des Moines to reiterate that call.

    How does being being one member of a hundred-person debating society give Clinton any experience in dealing with terrorism? Richardson couldn’t even talk to the Pakistani government while he was laying waste to the omelet bar at the UN. I remember that Clinton and Richardson both admitted that they couldn’t make headway against the Taliban and al Qaeda because Pervez Musharraf’s government ignored them everytime the Clinton Administration tried to enlist Pakistan. 

    I guess the Democrats figure we’ve all lost our memories.

    capt_596af4d416b544e0ad485570b37221c4_parade_magazine_benazir_bhutto_prn3.jpg

    Photo lifted from Drudge Report

    I can’t imagine any of the Democrat candidates telling their Democrat supporters that “I am what the terrorists most fear”. Well, especially since the terrorists and madmen around the world have already decided to support our Democrat candidates.

  • Benazir Bhutto Assassinated

    For her efforts to bring democracy to Pakistan, she was rewarded with murder. 

    Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto Killed in Homicide Attack at Rally in Pakistan

    Thursday, December 27, 2007

    Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a homicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, a party aide and a military official said.’

    RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a homicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally.

    The former prime minister died in Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she had been rushed to surgery after she was wounded in the attack.

    There were reports that Bhutto had been shot in the neck as she was leaving the scene of the bombing.

    “At 6:16 p.m. she expired,” said Wasif Ali Khan, a member of Bhutto’s party who was at the hospital.

    Her supporters at the hospital began chanting “Dog, Musharraf, dog,” referring to Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf.
    Some of them smashed the glass door at the main entrance of the emergency unit, others burst into tears. Top party leaders were outside the hospital, crying.

    An Associated Press reporter at the scene saw body parts and flesh scattered at the back gate of the Liaqat Bagh park in Rawalpindi, where the rally was held.
    He counted about 20 bodies, including police, and could see many other wounded.
    The road outside was stained with blood and people screamed for ambulances. Others gave water to the wounded lying in the street. The clothing of some of the victims was shredded and people put party flags over their bodies.

    The bomb went off just minutes after Bhutto spoke to thousands of supporters, and she appeared to be the target of the attack. Farahtullah Babar, the spokesman for her party, said her vehicle was about 50 yards away from blast, which went off as she was leaving the rally venue.

    Bhutto served twice as Pakistan’s prime minister between 1988 and 1996. She had returned to Pakistan from an eight-year exile on Oct. 18.

    Her homecoming parade in Karachi was also targeted by a suicide attacker, killing more than 140 people. On that occasion she narrowly escaped injury.

    Link: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,318510,00.html

    This is terrible. She worked hard to reform a country full of misogynist, Islamofascist miscreants. Pakistan has formented terrorist scumbags and extremists for years. She knew her life was in constant danger, but returned to her home and courageously stood up to subhuman filth.

    To be sure, the Musharraf regime will blame the United States for brokering an agreement to let her back into Pakistan, and the moonbats on the Left will blame President Bush because everything is his fault, from their lousy childhoods to their miserable worthless adult lives.

    She severed ties with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and they hated her for that. Musharraf on the other hand, has both groups running amok; terrorist camps operating within Pakistan’s borders and moles in his Intelligence Service, not to mention that BIN LADEN is still hiding there. He is no friend of the U.S.

    Bhutto was no angel, but she was willing to take them on and bring some much needed change. The last thing Pakistan needs is another reason for re-instatement of martial law or to disintegrate further into a cesspool of corruption and chaos.

    Musharraf is probably glad that someone finally got to her.  She was the biggest threat to the oppressive, corrupt regime.  No one has yet claimed responsibility for this atrocity, but Musharraf, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda head up the list.

    The “peaceful practitioners of Islam” tried unsuccessfully to assassinate her numerous times before, once even using a baby:

    A man had gotten close to her armored truck, the former prime minister said, and had been trying to hand across a small child as her motorcade inched through the thronged streets of Karachi. She remembers gesturing for the man to come closer.

    “It was about one or two years old, and I think it was a girl,” Mrs. Bhutto recalled. “We feel it was a baby, kidnapped, and its clothes were rigged with explosives. He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother, I love babies, but the [street lights] had already gone out, and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.” She would have been dead, she said, if she had not just dipped back inside her vehicle to loosen the shoes on her swollen feet.

    “The baby, the bomb, it went off only feet from me; there was nothing between us but the wall of the truck,” she said in an interview with The Washington Times on Tuesday. “We were rocking from side to side, this huge truck. We saw the bodies, the blood everywhere; we saw the carnage. Some bodies were naked, with their clothes burned off,” she said, shutting her Kohl-rimmed eyes against the vision.

    More than 170 supporters were killed in coordinated blasts along the route, a horror that was carried on live television and has shaped the already tumultuous campaign season here.

    Link: http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071213/FOREIGN/112140015/1001

    And on one occasion, a 15 year old:

    POLICE in Pakistan have stopped a 15-year-old boy they say was carrying a bomb made of dynamite and nails from getting into a rally by opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

    The boy got past the first of four security checkpoints set up outside the rally in the northwestern city of Peshawar but was caught at the second, said police officer Rahim Shah, according to the Associated Press.

    In October, suicide bombers struck a parade celebrating Ms Bhutto’s return from exile, killing more than 140 people in the southern city of Karachi.

    Link: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22975025-23109,00.html

    Christopher Hitchens gives a balanced–good and bad–viewpoint of the life and politics of Benazir Bhutto:

    Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.

    Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent “comeback” tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of Aquino.

    Who knows who did this deed? It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman’s Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it’s hard to construct any cui bono analysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.

    She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir.

    ……There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists.

    Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2180952/

    Expect a lot of rioting and more bombs. It won’t stop until all the muslim extremist pigs are dead, which means it won’t be any time soon.

    Jonn added 12/28/2007: CNN writes that Pakistan’s Interior Ministry is reporting that Bhutto was not killed by bullets, but by bashing her head on a handle inside the car.

  • Only ONE American Political Party EVER Advocated SLAVERY

    In an argument, sliding towards a flame war on a forum I frequent, the lie of Republican Racism was repeated a few too many times for me.
    In looking to disprove the claim that “The difference is that the Democrats as a matter of Party policy have put aside racism and instituted massive civil rights reforms over the last sixty years. The Republicans have, as a matter of stated Party policy, opposed every single one of them and have spent three Presidential Administrations rolling them back.” I stumbled across this site: The American Presidency Project it is run by UCSB and includes EVERY political party platform from 1840 to 2004 (democrat and republican). Very interesting reading. That Congress has no power, under the Constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the several States; and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything pertaining to their own affairs, not prohibited by the Constitution; that all efforts, by abolitionists or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our Political Institutions. That? Oh, THAT is from the Democratic Party Platform of 1844, giving the Democrats the distinction of being the ONLY political party to advocate slavery. There is a simply staggering amount of racial intolerance in the Democratic platforms. I am amazed that they actually put that vileness to paper, and history.
    What prompted this, was my posting of a link to this rather good Wall Street Journal piece by Bruce Bartlett: Whitewash
    The racist history the Democratic Party wants you to forget

  • Land reform ghosts and FARC’s hostages

    Just as the 49th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution rolls up on us, his legacy is reaching into Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela according to this report from the Miami Herald’s Casto Ocando;

    When Bienvenido Jorajuría could not get into his family’s La Quinta ranch in the fertile region of Yaracuy, in north central Venezuela, the Cuban-born rancher felt a familiar frustration.

    The land was confiscated earlier this year by President Hugo Chávez’s government after armed peasants backed by the national guard invaded it, despite the fact that it was in full production.

    For Jorajuría, it was the second time his family’s land had been expropriated. In 1960, his family’s farm in Matanzas, Cuba, was confiscated by Fidel Castro’s government.

    Funny how most of the US media is skipping right over this story. Just a few months ago, Chavez’ main ally, Islamic Republic’s Mahmoud Ahmidinejad proposed an alliance with the king of land reform – Robert Mugabe (FARS link). The subject of the story recalls the parallels between the seizure of his father’s land in Cuba and his own;

    ”They forced us to provide documents to prove that the property was private as far back as 1850,” said Adivi Ahmad, Bienvenido Jorajuría’s wife, who inherited part of the land in La Quinta, which was purchased by her father in 1947.

    ”Finding these documents was extremely difficult because of Venezuela’s public registry disorder,” Ahmad told El Nuevo Herald.

    Ahmad said it took six months and about $500 to compile and submit the documents, but later those documents ”got lost” in the office in charge of collecting them.

    The Jorajuría story is similar that of other ranch families of Cuban origin in Venezuela.

    Various parts of the story hint at Cuban government involvement in the expropriation particularly of  Cuban expatriots. Dirty pool at it’s dirtiest.

    Chavez’ opponents claim that these “land reform” measures explain much of the shortages of staples in Venezuela;

    ”When Chávez arrived in 1999, we produced 35,000 tons a year of sugar cane,” said Rodríguez, who arrived in Miami in June with his family. He said squatters used death threats to ”expel” him from his own land.

    In 2007, after a series of systematic invasions, Vladimir Rodríguez said he couldn’t harvest anything.

    ”And the ranch was totally lost, unproductive,” said Rodríguez, who is still awaiting a response from the Venezuelan government on the value of his confiscated property. He also is using his Cuban heritage to apply for permanent residency in Miami under the U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act.

    But seein’s how Chavez can’t solve his own domestic problems, he can get his commie buddies at FARC to release their hostages, apparently (AP/Yahoo link);

    President Hugo Chavez said Wednesday that he hopes three hostages will be freed by Colombian rebels within hours, and that Venezuela has planes and helicopters ready to retrieve them.
    Â
    “The only thing we need is the authorization of the Colombian government,” Chavez said at a news conference in the presidential palace. “We are ready to activate the humanitarian operation.”

    Chavez said he hoped it would be completed “in the coming hours.”

    But then, Chavez’ extra-Venezuelan image is much more important to him and his allies than Venezuelans’ views. Who cares if Venezuelans can’t get milk, sugar and meat as long as Chavez can score points with the US Bush-hating Left. More on the hostage release press conference at Kate’s hogar.

  • Zapatero & legislated history

    It’s difficult to believe that in this post-Soviet day and age, a liberal democracy in the western world would consider rewriting their history to create an official, government-approved version. But, that’s what is happening in modern Spain. In October, the Spanish parliament passed a “Law of Historical Memory”. No Pasaran’s Joe Noory warned of this impending farce last year;

      Zapatero is exercising a chilling fascist revision of the past. The Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party, Alvino-Mario Fantini reports, is even dispensing pensions to some who make a nice prop for their revision of the Spanish Civil War.

    The law, one of Zapatero’s many electoral promises, will honor the communists and socialists persecuted by Franco’s regime during his 36-year dictatorship.

    Specifically, the proposed law stipulates that the Spanish government will provide 60 million Euros–about $76,244,000–in “pensions, compensation and recognition schemes” to honor the estimated 285,000 (according to historian Hugh Thomas) Republican victims of the Civil War and the post-war dictatorship.

    It says nothing, however, of the nearly 145,000 members of the Nationalist coalition who were killed in action by Republican forces and executed by their militias. In fact, the law will ban all images, symbols and references to Franco and his regime in all public places (though most statues around the country have already been removed).

    Ian Buruma compares Zapatero’s attempt to rewrite history to dictatorships like Red China in the Japan Times;

    There are plausible reasons for enacting such a law. Many people killed by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War lie unremembered in mass graves. There is still a certain degree of nostalgia on the far right for Franco’s dictatorship. People gathered at his tomb earlier this year chanted “We won the Civil War!,” while denouncing socialists and foreigners, especially Muslims. Reason enough, one might think, for Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to use the law to exorcise the demons of dictatorship for the sake of democracy’s good health.

    But legislation is a blunt instrument for dealing with history. While historical discussion won’t be out of bounds in Spain, even banning ceremonies celebrating bygone days may go a step too far. The desire to control both past and present is, of course, a common feature of dictatorships.

    In the Australian, Buruma continues;

    While the Spanish Civil War was not on par with the Holocaust, even bitter history leaves room for interpretation. Truth can be found only if people are free to pursue it. Many brave people have risked or lost their lives in defence of this freedom. It is right for a democracy to repudiate a dictatorship, and the new Spanish law is cautiously drafted, but it is better to leave people free to express even unsavoury political sympathies, for legal bans don’t foster free thinking, they impede them.Â

    Richard Rahn writes in today’s Washington Times that the law might have the effect of deepening polarization among Spaniards, already divided by language and culture. He points out the under Zapatero’s predecessor, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain became a successful European nation, both economically and politically, once again, but that Zapatero threatens that stability with his socialist game-playing right out of Orwell’s “1984”.

    Beth Twiston Davies (Times Online) joins Joe Noory in the opinion that the Law of Historical Memory is an anti-Catholic swipe;

    Three days before the law of historical memory was passed, nearly 500 of those religious victims were honoured by the Catholic Church in a mass beatification ceremony. The 498 individuals now on the path to sainthood were killed, often after being tortured, in 1934, 1936 and 1937.

    The Vatican described them as “martyrs of the 21st century”. Spanish Catholics such as Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña, secretary-general of the Asociación Católica de Propagandistas (The Catholic Propagandists’ Association), describe them as innocent victims of the wave of anti-clerical persecution that swept 1930s Spain.

    “The Left wants to portray the martyrs as politicised clerics ,” says Rodríguez. “They don’t want to recognise the fact there was a religious persecution. These were simply Christians who died forgiving their assassins, and were killed out of hatred for the Christian faith.”

    Imagine if the left in the United States succeeds in forbidding the various ceremonies we’ve to which we’ve become accustomed honoring soldiers from both sides in our own Civil War. Suppose for a minute, we succumb to their demonization of those who say that Senator Joe McCarthy turns out to be right about Communists in the State Department and in Congress – and in Hollywood and ban such research and scholarly work.

    Suppose we weren’t allowed to speak out against John Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” testimony of 1971 during his presidential campaign and that the thousands of veterans who gathered outside of the Capitol had been imprisoned for questioning his veracity at those hearings.

    I don’t what the Europeans are thinking when they allow their governments to limit the discussion of unpopular political opinions, but we need to be on guard against imitating them.

  • Subdued GOP activity in Iowa reflects uncertainty

    Subdued GOP activity in Iowa reflects uncertainty. That is the title of this USA Today article.
    USA Today is wrong. That isn’t what it reflects. What it reflects is the undeniable and horrible fact that the republican candidates all suck out loud.

  • Clinton (Hearts) Vets – suddenly

    The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire recounts a Hillary speech to veterans in Iowa yesterday;

    Speaking to a crowd of mostly elderly and wheelchair-bound veterans from World War II and the Vietnam War, Mrs. Clinton announced her plans to enact an updated version of the GI Bill of Rights that would expand education, housing and entrepreneurial benefits. (more…)

  • Hillary; I control oil prices

    Proving that Democrats don’t understand market forces, Hillary announced that simply by her presence in the White House, oil prices will drop. “How?”, you might ask;(Daily News)

    “I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil,” Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. “They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede.”

    Clinton argued that former President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s actually started moving in the right direction toward energy independence, but his successor, Ronald Reagan, “dismantled” that work.

    Jimmy Carter, huh? Invoking the ghost of Jimmy Carter’s famous “Malaise Speech” probably isn’t a good idea for a Democrat candidate. (more…)