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

Category: Politics

  • It’s all about Vietnam, except when it’s about Vietnam

    Democrats can’t let go of the 60s. They think they actually won something when the US began pulling combat troops out of Vietnam in 1972. They forget the bloodbath that happened when Saigon fell in 1975, they forget the Vietnamese incursions into Laos during the Carter Administration (that were halted by the Chinese), they forget Pol Pot’s killing fields. All they care about is regaining their former bloodstained glory on the front pages of “their” media”. 

    In light of the reports coming out of Iraq by alternate means, like Michael Yon Online, since we can’t trust the media to tell us what’s happening over there, Jon Ward of the Washington Times reports that the President pleaded with Americans from Cleveland yesterday;

    “I believe that its in this nations interests to give the commander a chance to fully implement his operations,” Mr. Bush said, speaking at a downtown hotel to a local business group.

    Mr. Bush did not reveal any changes to his strategy or thinking on Iraq and did not talk about his hopes for withdrawing troops, despite reports that conversations on the topic are intensifying inside his administration.

    Instead, Mr. Bush said, “Congress ought to wait for General Petraeus to come back and give us assessment of the strategy that he’s putting in place before they make any decisions.”

    It sounds reasonable, but fairly unrealistic given the political backbiting that’s happening eve in the President’s own party. But, the Democrats, the party of Insanity (doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results each time), plan on running through the same bill they ran through a scant few weeks ago, hoping for different results. From Sean Lengell, Washington Times;

    Senate Democrats yesterday called for withdrawing most U.S. troops from Iraq by April 30 — less than two months after a similar measure was soundly defeated — as the White House dispatched its top war advisers to Capitol Hill to embolden Republican allies.

    Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said setting a troop withdrawal timetable will force Iraqi political leaders to take responsibility for their own country.

    “The legislation that we are proposing … would give commanders the flexibility to the pace of reductions and the units to be reduced, and I think it’s the appropriate way to go,” said Sen. Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat, who co-sponsored the measure with Mr. Levin.

    Republicans leaders called the maneuver premature, saying that President Bush’s surge strategy is starting to pay dividends and that any major changes shouldn’t occur before Gen. David H. Petraeus provides his September report on the state of the war.

    Well, we just can’t let the troops win too many battles, can we? So it’s time for the Democrats to do the sabateur work that al Qaeda can’t seem to do these days. With Cindy Sheehan breathing down her botoxed and stretched neckflaps, Nancy Pelosi is planning an entire month of intellectually bankrupt votes to undermine the troops’ victories in Iraq;

    House Democrats are planning a series of votes this month on Iraq that they hope will ratchet up pressure on the White House and congressional Republicans to change course on the unpopular war or suffer political consequences.

    Sensing that additional GOP members might follow the more skeptical path taken recently by Sens. Richard Lugar (Ind.) and Pete Domenici (N.M.) and Rep. John Doolittle (Calif.), Democratic leaders have decided to ignore White House requests that lawmakers wait until September to see how President Bush’s surge works.

    “I think you’re seeing signs that the dam’s about to bust,” said Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), tapped as leadership’s coordinator for Iraq strategy. “Someone on the Republican side has to be like Fulbright during the Vietnam War.”

    Just like Vietnam, huh Larson – the anti-US Left wants to relive their golden days. It doesn’t matter that history has proven them wrong then, or that history will prove them wrong on this one, too. just so long as they get to see their name in the paper.

    The Washington Post still claims there’s a large defection of Republicans from the President’s war plans – but they can only name a few, oddly;

    Facing crumbling support for the war among their own members, Senate Republican leaders yesterday sought to block bipartisan efforts to force a change in the American military mission in Iraq.

    But the GOP leadership’s use of a parliamentary tactic requiring at least 60 votes to pass any war legislation only encouraged the growing number of Republican dissenters to rally and seek new ways to force President Bush’s hand. They are weighing a series of proposals that would change the troops’ mission from combat to counterterrorism, border protection and the training of Iraqi security forces.
     
    “I think we should continue to ratchet up the pressure — in addition to our words — to let the White House know we are very sincere,” said Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio), who broke with the president last month.

    Voinovich and Snowe are the only two defectors in the article. Add in Domenici and Spector, that’s four. It’s hardly a defection, it’s barely newsworthy – cetainly not enough to write a whole column. But there’s the Post spending bandwidth on a stupid subject while they could write stories about the troops’ several victories this week, or the horror that al Qaeda has inflicted on Iraqis.  The Post could actually report on the war rather than those idiot conversations they have with useless politicians.

    In the meantime, Cindy Sheehan is zeroing in on the old SanFran Hag;

     Cindy Sheehan bid farewell to her former “peace camp” near President Bush’s ranch and began a nearly two-week trek Tuesday toward Washington, D.C., with her sights set on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
    Sheehan, a Californian, officially announced that she intends to run as an independent against Pelosi in 2008 if the San Francisco congresswoman doesn’t move to impeach Bush by July 23, the day she expects to reach Washington.

    “I know what Californians care about,” Sheehan said. “They don’t care about the ruling power elite.”

    Yeah, Cindy, you probably know about as much about what Americans care about as Nancy – but I wouldn’t embarrass myself by saying it aloud in public if I were you. I guess we can’t count on you to keep your promises, either. Promises like leaving the stage and letting the adults run the country. If ever there was someone less worthy of my attention, I don’t know who that would be.

    So I guess we peg our foreign policy to the whims of gutless coward and crazed dingbats.

    From yesterday’s Day By Day;

     

     

  • So what do we believe?

    On the one hand, we have Rowan Scarbourgh in the Washington Examiner telling us that the general concensus is that al Qaeda is losing ground in Iraq;

    U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq believe 2007 will be looked on someday as “the beginning of the defeat of al Qaeda,” an adviser to the command in Baghdad said Monday.

    Retired Army Gen. John Keane offered the assessment after being briefed by a senior intelligence official who is an expert on the insurgency. The upbeat view marked a shift from 2006 intelligence reports that al Qaeda in Iraq was growing stronger.

    […]

    First, Sunni sheiks are breaking alliances with al Qaeda and joining the coalition. “They are fed up with this barbarism and four years of war,” Keane said during a talk at the American Enterprise Institute.

    Second, the U.S. counteroffensive of more than 155,000 troops is simultaneously attacking al Qaeda safe havens around the country — a tactic not used before.

    But then you turn to the Associated Press’ Anne Flaherty (whose name turns up on nearly every anti-Bush story byline) and you get crap like this – a whole story pegged to an anonymous source, no back-up research, just quoting some guy like there’s no tomorrow (or no Google); 

     A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reforms, speeding up the Bush administration’s reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

    The “pivot point” for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush’s so-called “surge” plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the draft is still under discussion.

    So the military is winning (barely a month into the “surge”) and AP calls it a failure. Sound like Vietnam even a little bit? And for some reason, the Washington Post thinks that a couple of spineless GOP RINOs has the administration running scared;

    President Bush, facing a growing Republican revolt against his Iraq policy, has rejected calls to change course but will launch a campaign emphasizing his intent to draw down U.S. forces next year and move toward a more limited mission if security conditions improve, senior officials said yesterday.

    Top administration officials have begun talking with key Senate Republicans to walk them through his view of the next phase in the war, beyond the troop increase he announced six months ago today. Bush plans to lay out what an aide called “his vision for the post-surge” starting in Cleveland today to assure the nation that he, too, wants to begin bringing troops home eventually.

    The President isn’t explaining it to regular people because he’s afraid of a few pussies in the Senate – he’s explaining it to regular people because he has to talk above the caucaphony of idiots and morons in the press like Anne Flaherty.

    Yeah, I know, she probably thinks she’s being patriotic by publishing every bit of contrary information she can dredge up. Apparently dissent is back in vogue – no matter what kind of damage they do to our worldwide reputation or to our national security. But, you’d think every once in a while she’d try to publish the absolute truth just to balance out her prejudices.

  • Treason

    Apparently, US Congressmen standing on Saddam Hussein’s terrace declaring that Hussein is a more rational actor and more trustworthy than President Bush on the eve of our invasion of Hussein’s Iraq is not treason.

    The US Speaker of the House meeting with terrorist governments and transmitting false messages from other governments against the advice of the Executive Branch is not treason. Facilitating the sales of space and missile technology to our economic and military rival, China, in return for political campaign donations is not treason. Turning a blind eye to North Korea’s nuclear program is not treason.

    Calling our soldiers murderers and SS concentration camp guards is not treason. Demanding the release from Guantanamo of dangerous terrorists bent on our destruction is not treason. Facilitating the immigration invasion from our South is not treason.

    So what is treason these days? Ask Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.;

    “Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy’s son, who grew hoarse from shouting. “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.”

    Yep, global warming deniers are treasonous. People who question the Flat Earth Society of Global Warming Nuts are treasonous. If you don’t run around behind Chicken Little Manbearpig and screech that the sky is falling, you’re a traitor.

    Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

  • What is a bi-partisan strategy?

    I’m still trying to catch up on news and the idiocy that seems to have permeated the District of Columbia while I was gone (only three days, f’pete’s sake), so excuse me if this old news to you. In the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial column today, “Republican Retreat“, they quoted Dick Lugar;

    “I do not doubt the assessments of military commanders that there has been some progress in security,” Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared on the Senate floor late last month. But that didn’t stop Mr. Lugar from concluding that its chances of success are “very limited.” Why? The “short period framed by our own domestic political debate” won’t allow it, he says. Instead, Mr. Lugar wants a “sustainable bipartisan strategy” along the lines recommended in November by the Iraq Study Group. Last week, New Mexico’s Pete Domenici noisily joined this bandwagon, as have several other Republican Senators, some of whom face tough re-election fights next year.

    All of this nuanced language is just goofy posturing. What the hell is a “sustainable bipartisan strategy”? That’s just buffoonery – you either win or you lose, you either have a strategy to win, or you have a losing strategy. You can’t have it both ways.

    There’s no compromising on strategy to please a political base – the political base aren’t interested in the particulars of fighting wars and they wouldn’t know a battle formation from an SOS breakfast.

    That’s why our founding fathers didn’t make Congress the Commanders-in-Chief – they just hand out the money. You can’t fight wars in Committee. Look how long it’s taken for Congress just to come up with a defense bill. Imagine how long wars would take if the military had to wait for Congress to make a decision about tactics or strategy.

    So what if Lugar, Domenici and the unnnamed ones are in a political battle? Will any of them be killed as a result? But, in the meantime, how many of our troops are dying because their political posturing rewards every bullet the bad guys fire at them?

    For once, just once, I want to see a politician put the country and the folks fight for them ahead of their political careers.

    The WSJ concludes;

    As for Mr. Lugar’s bipartisan hope, it would be wonderful to think that Washington could come together around a sustainable, long-term Iraq strategy. But how many Democrats are ready to work with Mr. Bush on that? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now calls ending the war his “moral” obligation — as if America’s departure would end anything — and he responded to Mr. Domenici’s statement by saying GOP Senators must now vote for a rapid withdrawal.

    The Democrats don’t want to end the war before next November any-damn-way – They need the issue for the election. And Harry Reid wouldn’t know a moral obligation if it bit his hip pocket. Apparently, Lugar and Domenici suffer from the same affliction.

  • Congress returns ready to battle the President

    I read that headline in the Washington Examiner this morning and the first thing I thought was “how is that news”? They might as well run a headline that says “Man biten by dog” or “Summer expected to be warm”.

    Congressmen returning from their Independence Day break are ready for battle with the White House, with Democrats decrying President Bush’s commutation of former aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison sentence and fighting Bush’s latest claim of executive privilege.

    Both events occurred around Congress’ vacation, inflaming an intense battle between Democrats and Bush over his use of executive power. There was relatively high tension on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue as majority Democrats – and increasing numbers of Republicans – challenged Bush’s Iraq war policy.

    In Roll Call this morning, it’s Stephen Dennis’ “Democrats Keep Focus on Libby“($);

    Incensed Democrats plan to use President Bush’s decision to spare Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, from prison to bolster their theme of a GOP “culture of corruption” with hearings this week and on the campaign trail.

    Democrats have few options to strike back at the president, given their slim majorities and the reticence of Democratic leaders to consider impeachment despite an increasing drumbeat from liberal activists and growing support in some polls. The number of Democratic co-signers to an impeachment resolution for Cheney introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) is expected to inch higher this week but remains a tiny subset of the Democratic Caucus.

    But that doesn’t mean Democrats won’t try to score political points.

    According to Dennis, Conyers wants to start an investigation of the pardon and subpoena Libby (to what result, I can’t understand), a witness list is supposed to come out today. Wexler wants to censure Bush – what a crock of dung. Wasting time on stupid political popcorn farts. Meanwhile, Emily Pearce ($) writes, also in Roll Call, that Reid probably won’t get any of the spending bills he needs to pass this year;

    While July is often reserved for appropriations bills in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has set aside very little time to complete even one or two bills this month, despite the fact that the chamber’s conservatives appear in no mood to help smooth the way and President Bush is expected to veto the majority of spending measures that reach his desk.

    So, instead of doing their job in Congress, the Democrats are just making noise. Useless, pointless political noise.  

    Ya know what headline I’d reallly like to see? “Congress returns ready to battle terrorists”, or “Congress outraged by al Qaeda connections in Glasgow plot” or “Democrats Keep Focus on the War Against Terror”.

    Since when is it more important for our elected representatives to be more ready to do battle with our other elected representatives than they are ready to do battle with the enemies of our people? Or why is it more acceptable to the American people that the politicians are more focused on “scoring political points” than they are on scoring wins against the enemies that want to destroy us all?

    Me? I’ve returned ready to fight all of the enemies of our people – especially the ones in Congress. 

  • Clinton II; Libby pardon was cronyism

    I’m still trying to catch up on the news after being in the hinterlands among people who are more worried about the lack of rain for this year’s sweet corn harvest than they are worried about politics. I figured that the Libby thing would be played out by now, but being among real people made me forget that Republican transgressions are always much more serious than those of the Democrats – well, for the media and the Congressional Democrats anyway.

    I dipped in my toe this morning by watching Fox News Sunday which had my idiot, pussy, partisan Congressman Chris VanHollen as a guest. And so I can always count on him to get my blood pressure up – because it reminds me of how stupid my neighbors are for electing the moron to Congress. He was one of the first to pile on the Army over the conditions at Walter Reed, then when the Army tried to speed up construction of the new Walter Reed facilities in Bethesda, VanHollen stepped in to delay construction because it’d disrupt his commute in the morning.

    So I jumped over to the Fox News website and watched Hillary Clinton call the Libby pardon “cronyism”(Video). Cronyism? Can she be serious? Or does she forget that we can google a search of her husband’s pardons – he pardoned murderers, terrorists and drug dealers as well as cronies. In fact Clinton, pardoned more people on January 20th, 2001 than President Bush has pardoned in the last six years.

    Clinton pardoned contributors, disgraced cabinet members, Susan MacDougal who kept his secrets in prison (unlike her husband who mysteriously died when he was about to tell what he knew), Clinton’s own drug dealing half-brother, a disgraced CIA director who was under investigation for pilfered national secrets. But pardoning Libby is “cronyism” – despite the fact that Libby wasn’t the criminal the special prosecuter was looking for, or involved in the incident that the prosecutor was investigating.

    This extent of partisanship probably borders on Democrats being criminally partisan.

  • Spector needs a copy of the Constitution

    According to John Stanton of Roll Call, Arlen Specter is pushing a bill to limit the scope of presidential signing statements;

    Frustrated by the Bush administration’s continued use of presidential signing statements to challenge or ignore provisions of Congressionally approved legislation, Senate Judiciary ranking member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has reintroduced legislation to rein in President Bush’s ability to use the tactic.

    Specter, who has long been a critic of Bush’s use of signing statements, quietly introduced his Presidential Signing Statements Act of 2007 on Friday.

    “The president cannot use a signing statement to rewrite the words of a statute nor can he use a signing statement to selectively nullify those provisions he does not like,” Specter said in a floor statement.

    “The Constitution grants the president a specific, narrowly defined role in enacting legislation. … The Constitution provides that when a bill is presented to the president, he may either sign it or veto it with his objections. He may also choose to do nothing, thus rendering a so-called pocket veto. The president, however, cannot veto part of a bill, he cannot veto certain provisions he does not like.”

    So what Specter is saying is that he doesn’t like the way the President interprets the laws Congress writes, so he wants to improve the President’s reading skills by taking the President to court. I guess that won’t slow down government much will it?

    But the only thing the Constitution says about the President’s responsiblity to execute Congress’ laws is “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Now that doesn’t sound very “specific or narrowly defined” to me, Senator.

    And I don’t think the founders were inclined towards one branch of government using another branch of government to bend the third branch of government to it’s will. I think the good Senator has lost more than his hair.

  • Latin America and the Democrats

    The Gateway Pundit has a great piece today about Democrats playing Russian Roulette with our foreign policy in regards to Latin America entitled FARC You! where he catalogues Democrat hypocrisy towards our allies in that region.

    The reason it caught my eye is some of the rhetoric I’ve been hearing from the Left in regards to the Bush Administration in Latin America that’s not exactly the truth. For example, Barack Obama has a statement on his senate.gov website that claims the Bush Administration isn’t engaged in Latin America;

    I am, however, disappointed that the President has fallen so short in his promise to transform U.S. relations with the Americas. Our regional relationships cannot be properly attended to with one six-day trip, a series of photo opportunities, and some lofty rhetoric on collaboration.

    Neglect? Why, just this week, the Bush Administration has finalized trade agreements with Peru, Columbia and Panama – to absolutely no fanfare in the press. because these trade pacts are all opposed by Big Labor. Oh, and they’re good for the US – can’t see the President getting good press over anything can we? These trade agreements give these country the ecomonic power to keep their residents at home instead sending them here as illegal immigrants. (Not to mention, it might drive the price of sugar down far enough that Coca Cola might put sugar in that drink again and make it tasty again)

    In Miami this week, Obama said, “It’s not sufficient for us to have Latin American policy based on not liking Hugo Chavez and not liking Fidel Castro.” That’s pretty simplistic rhetoric, actually. The Bush administration has pretty much ignored Chavez and Castro – I don’t see any statements coming out of the White House everytime Banana-brains starts yammering paranoid rants about someone wanting to kill his useless ass. I don’t think anyone in the Administration has even acknowledged that Chavez exists. His own people can deal with him – and Castro – phht – he’ll be dead soon enough, so who cares.

    President Bush even travelled around Central and South America in the Fall of 2005 – I left Panama the day before he arrived and it was the talk of the entire country. He’s a very popular figure there, despite the bad press.

    Think maybe our stature in Latin America has suffered because Democrats won’t meet with our greatest ally in the region President Alvaro Uribe has been snubbed by the Congressional Democrats as well as Al Gore. This from a Mary Anatasia O’Grady piece in the Wall Street Journal from April entitled “One Righteous Gringo“;

    Al Gore may not have known that he was taking the side of a former terrorist and ally of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez when he waded into Colombian politics 10 days ago. But that’s not much consolation to 45 million Colombians who watched their country’s already fragile international image suffer another unjust blow, this time at the hands of a former U.S. vice president.

    The event was a climate-change conference in Miami, where Mr. Gore and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe were set to share the stage. At the last minute, Mr. Gore notified the conference organizers that he refused to appear with Mr. Uribe because of “deeply troubling” allegations of human- rights violations swirling around the Colombian government.

    It is not clear whether the ex-veep knows that making unsubstantiated claims of human-rights violations has been a key guerrilla weapon for more than a decade, along with the more traditional practices of murdering, maiming and kidnapping civilians. Nor is it clear whether Mr. Gore knew that the recycled charges that caught his attention are being hyped by Colombian Sen. Gustavo Petro, a close friend of Mr. Chávez and former member of the pro-Cuban M-19 terrorist group. What we do know is that Mr. Gore’s line of reasoning — that Colombia is not good enough to rub shoulders with the righteous gringos — is also being peddled by some Democrats in Congress, the AFL-CIO and other forces of anti-globalization. The endgame is all about killing the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

    When Mr. Uribe got wind of Mr. Gore’s decision to stand him up, he rightly interpreted its significance: Colombia is the victim of an international smear campaign that, if left unchecked, could undermine congressional support for the pending trade deal. Rather than let the whispering go on, Mr. Uribe elevated the matter, calling two press conferences over two days to refute the charges, which he says are damaging the country’s interests. He also asked Mr. Gore to look “at Colombia closely” so he could see the progress that has been made.

    By the way, President Uribe’s father was killed by terrorists – tough for them if he’s a little harsh in dealing with them. Since when is Al Gore willing to trade our friends down the river because he heard an unsubstantiated rumor somewhere?  

    So how exactly is Bush damaging our relations in Latin America? He’s got Democrats undermining his efforts with their petty politics, Democrats winging their way to Venezuela to gladhand with blood-soaked tyrants while they turn their backs on the people who are helping fight our enemies.

    Just like in the Middle East where Democrats have tea with our enemies and snub our allies. Maybe we have all of these problems because we present a fickle foreign policy – towards all of our allies and our enemies. Our foreign policy is ambiguous because we have 525 ambassadors in Congress – not to mention the ancillary ambassadors who are former presidents and vice-presidents. 

    I’m pretty certain that the founding fathers intended that the president be the sole voice of our nation to other nations. Maybe we need to impeach all of these extraneous diplomats floating around the world operating under a false flag.