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

Category: Politics

  • Syria’s martyrdom superhighways

    In today’s DC Examiner, Rowan Scarborough tells us that Syria is the entry-point for suicide bombers in Iraq;

    Al-Qaida in Iraq is operating three main entry routes for suicide bombers coming into Iraq from Syria, despite more than three years of U.S. efforts to control the border and convince Damascus to evict the jihadists, an American military officer said Tuesday.

    A bomber struck again in Iraq Tuesday, this time a woman who detonated a bomb under her black abaya, killing herself and 16 others at a police recruiting station. It could not be learned if she was an Iraqi or an imported terrorist. But the U.S. command says the vast majority of suicide bombers — al-Qaida’s principal means of attack — are foreigners.

    This should delight Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who just last week announced to the world that Syria is the key to peace in the Middle East (if only the US and Israel would trust President Bashar Asad). Now she and Holocaust survivor Tom Lantos hinted that they’d be willing to go to visit Holocaust-denier Ahmadinejad and do for Iran what they did in Syria – lend legitimacy to rogue entities in the Middle East.

    This Op/Ed appeared in the Washington Times (h/t Dadmanly)on February 20th – well before Pelosi headed to Syria – I wonder if she confronted Assad about this intelligence;

      Regional intelligence services and inside sources from within Sunni officer corps opposed to the Assad regime have identified major foreign-fighter training camps in northern Syria and just outside Damascus overseen by Syrian Military Intelligence and run by former Iraqi Ba’athi Generals and senior Saddam Fedayeen commanders.
        One major foreign fighter camp exists in the Latakia province in northern Syria, a mountainous area replete with Syrian Military Intelligence facilities and wide swaths of ostensibly government property closed to the public. The Iraqi officer in charge there is one Maj. Gen. Majid Sulayman. Yet another such camp exists 40 kilometers to the west of the border town of Qamishli, which lies in the Kurdish area in the northeastern tip of Syria bordering Iraq and Turkey; it is run by Maj. Gen. Qays al-Adhami. The al-Shaybani camp lies 30 kilometers south of Damascus and also trains foreign fighters. The al-Ikhals camp lies in the heart of the Qaysun mountain range near Damascus.

    Please read the entire details of the Op/Ed piece.

    And AP reports that the Mahdi Army commanders admit they’ve trained their troops and receive material support in Iran;

    Iranian intelligence operatives have been training Iraqi fighters inside Iran on how to use and assemble deadly roadside bombs known as EFPs, the U.S. military spokesman said today.
        Commanders of a splinter group inside the Shi’ite Mahdi Army militia have said that as many as 4,000 members of their organization were trained in Iran and that they have stockpiles of EFPs, weapons that cause great uneasiness among U.S. forces here because they penetrate heavily armored vehicles.
        U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell would not say how many militia fighters had been trained in Iran but said that questioning of fighters captured as recently as this month confirmed many had been in Iranian training camps.
        “We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them. We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month from detainees? debriefs,” Gen. Caldwell said at a weekly briefing

    So Pelosi and Lantos are hinting at a trip to Iran while Iran is supplying the militias that are keeping us involved in Iraq. How much sense does that make?

    This why Americans don’t trust Democrats with our foreign policy. Their refusal to accept the realities of the world color their politics. They’re like children playing mock-UN in grade school.

    The reason the President called Hussein, Iran and Kim Jong IL the Axis of Evil is because you can’t trust them. They talk out of both sides of their mouths and make public statements that they have no intention of following through. I guess that’s why Democrats have such a kinship with them – Democrats do the same thing before elections. Which might explain why Pelosi’s approval numbers are plummeting.

  • Webb; we can’t call ourselves Americans

    Spoiled brat, Senator Jim Webb told a group of University of Virginia students that we should shut down the Guantanamo detention facility because it’s un-Americans according to the Washington Examiner and AP;

    Webb said he agreed early in the war on terrorism that such a facility was needed. “But there comes a point where people need to be dealt with through the legal system,” Webb said. “I think that time has come.”

    People? Sure, Jim, people should be dealt with through the legal system. But the only people at Guantanamo are our troops who are guarding a pack of rabid creatures who want to kill women and children.

    After speaking to the students in professor Larry J. Sabato’s class on American politics, Webb told reporters that the detainees should either be declared prisoners of war or charged in the American judicial system if the U.S. continues to hold them captive.

    “We can’t just continue to hold people in limbo without charges for this period of time and still call ourselves Americans,” Webb said.

    Then what are we? Sitting ducks? In my opinion, as valueless at it might be, we’ve never been threatened by an enemy like this before, so our response calls for a unique response. Much like Bill Clinton’s unique solution to the haitian immigrant problem – he put Haitians escaping Haiti on Guantanamo in a tent city for an undetermined amount of time. Did Webb have a problem with that?

    Webb admits that he was in favor of the detention of the creatures at Guantanamo before he succumbed to Bush Derangement Syndrome, why has he suddenly lost his way? Maybe because it’s not politically expedient? Declaring these creatures POWs will only make their lives better – that’s not what they’d do for us if given an opportunity. Putting them in our legal system will only unneccessarily overburden untrained civilian personnel.

    Webb also went on to complain to the students that his job is hard because he has to vote on stuff and he’s tied down to his office. How can we treat a US Senator like that and still call ourselves Americans?

  • Levin finally admits Democrats are clueless on Iraq

    So I figure the folks over at HuffPo, et al. have smoke coming out of their ears after Carl Levin admitted that Congress won’t cut off funding for the Iraq war. From Bloomberg;

    “We’re not going to cut off funding for the troops,” the 72-year-old Michigan Democrat said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “But what we should do, and we’re going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement.”

    So why didn’t they just say that in the first place? If that’s what Levin admits that they “should” do, why all of the dust clouds about troop withdrawals and time schedules? Why’d ya’all spend so much time buying each other off with pork? Because the half-wits from Code Pink and the KosKids won’t stand for it, that’s why. And they still believe all that talk about a “mandate” for Democrats to end the war.

    If Democrats had a “mandate” they’d have a majority in Congress to match. As it is, when Lieberman votes with Republicans, Democrats are screwed in the Senate. In the House, in November 435 seats were up for a vote and only 286 (53%) went for Democrats. That’s a majority, but it ain’t no mandate, folks.

    Of course there are people in Congress that you can’t tell which side they’re on  – like Arlen Specter, who the Boston Globe quotes;

    Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said “there have not been sufficient efforts at discussions” between lawmakers and the White House.

    “We cannot leave the troops unfunded in the field,” Specter said on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “That just can’t be done. And Congress is not in a position to micromanage the war. But we do not have any good alternative. Right now, you can’t see the end of the tunnel, let alone a light at the end of the tunnel.”

    Specter said he was not prepared “to withdraw funding at this time. But my patience, like many others, is growing very thin.”

    My patience is growing thin, too, Arlen. Quit pandering to the extreme elements of THE OTHER PARTY and grow a fricken backbone. It’s guys like you that muddy the debate. Either mount that horse or go sit in the barn.

    And little Chuckie Schumer is still living in an alternate universe, according to the Washington Post;

    Although Democrats expect to have to negotiate with the White House, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) made clear on “Fox News Sunday” that they would portray a veto as Bush denying funds to the military.

    Schumer added that the president must change his Iraq strategy, because “70 percent of the American people feel it’s misguided. If a change in strategy means not supporting the troops, then 70 percent of the American people don’t support the troops.”

    Which strategy is Schumer talking about? The one in November or the most recent one? Or is he just yammering to keep people confused?

    In Washington Post’s The Talk, they quoted Schumer differently – in the context of a threat;

    Democrats also suggested their strategy would be to portray Bush as the one who is denying funds to the troops.

    “Should he veto this bill, which means he will be vetoing the money for the troops, we will try to come up with a way, … trying to compromise with the White House, that both supports the troops and yet changes the strategy in Iraq, which we feel is misguided,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”

    So they’re trying the old strategy that worked for them in 1995 budget battle – blame their opponents with the help of their willing accomplices in the media. But, I think it’ll backfire this time – just because the nutroots have already shown us that their party, that MoveOn claims to have bought and paid for, is the party that can’t support the troops.

  • You can see Iraq from here

    The Washington Post’s Thomas Ricks correctly describes the two Iraq wars concurrently being fought;

    There are two Iraq wars being waged, according to military officers on the ground and defense experts: the one fought in the streets of Baghdad, and the war as it is perceived in Washington.

    Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took over as the top U.S. commander in Iraq in February, cited the disparity last week. “The Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock,” he said in a television interview. “So we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps . . . put a little more time on the Washington clock.”

    One result of this disparity is the emergence of radically different views of the impact of the new strategy, which has been referred to as a “surge” because it sends more troops into Iraq but which is more noteworthy for moving U.S. troops off large, isolated bases and into smaller outposts across the capital.

    Initial reports indicate that his strategy is working well, in that al Qaida is being pushed into the smaller towns outside of Baghdad and exposing themselves to gunfire, as reported by the Washington Times (via AP);

    North of the capital, in the increasingly dangerous Diyala provincial capital of Baqouba, police reported 21 more bodies dumped in the streets, victims of the intense sectarian warfare. All were shot execution-style and many had been tortured. At least 62 bodies have been found in or near Baqouba since Tuesday.
        A total of 58 persons were killed or found dead across Iraq yesterday in the eighth week of the U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown on the capital and surrounding cities and towns.
        Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, meanwhile, said government officials from Iraq’s neighbors, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and representatives of the Group of Eight industrialized nations would meet in Egypt early next month.

    With the release of the 15 British sailors and marines last week, we can get back to the business of killing malevolent influences in Iraq, even though Jalal Sharafi, a supposed Iranian diplomat claims that he wasn’t treated as well as the British by the CIA;

    At the time of his disappearance, Iran alleged Sharafi had been abducted by an Iraqi military unit commanded by American forces — a charge repeated by several Iraqi Shiite lawmakers. U.S. authorities denied any role in his disappearance.

    I guess the CIA is disguised as Iraqis these days.

    Speaking of Iran, nothing that the Iranian government does happens in a vacuum. I’m pretty sure that the Iranians kidnapped the British sailors and marines to disrupt their counter-smuggling operations for a few weeks. I expect more IED attacks with Iranian-manufactured shaped charges and perhaps some more sophisticated chlorine-gas dirty bombs to make an appearance in th next few weeks to make the “surge” appear ineffective and to electrify the Washington war on Iraq. I’m sure the Democrats will be eager to comply with the Iranians and ramp up the rhetoric when the time comes.

    AP reports that al Sadr bravely calls for his militiamen to fight the US invaders – but AP neglects to mention that Mookie al-Sadr is making this call to arms from the bar at the Tehran Holiday Inn Express;

    The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen on Sunday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq’s army and police should join him in defeating “your archenemy.”

    Yeah, powerful. He’s not even in the country and he doesn’t realize that most of his militia has been disarmed and rounded up. I guess he’s doing his best impression of Ray Nagin calling for New Orleans’ residents to be brave from his room at the Baton Rouge Ramada. But it does mean that Iran has made resupplies available for the Shi’ite militias. al-Sadr wouldn’t be making this call if he didn’t already know they had the means to attack – it wouldn’t make him look as “powerful” to AP if they weren’t. 

    All this yapping on the news channels by retired US officers second-guessing the British hostages is just blather, as far as I’m concerned. Firstly, the US Code of Conduct leaves enough wiggle room for American prisoners of war to do just what the British did in their TV interviews. All this false bravado about resistance to an enemy is real easy coming from people who’ve never spent time in foreign incarceration with no light at the end of the tunnel. Having been in a similar situation in my younger days, I sympathize with them.

    Yeah, they probably should have resisted capture. I would have – not because I’m brave, but because I’d rather get shot to death than beheaded – which seems to be popular in that part of the world. But, I’m glad neither were in store for these British warriors. I’d sure like to see them resist temptation of commercializing their ordeal, though.

    According to the Wall Street Journal, the Iranians denied Maliki access to it’s airpace while he was flying to other Arab countries this weekend. Yet Ahmadinejad thinks he should be able to fly to New York whenever he wants. Real mature, fella.

    Of course the New York Times think the most important thing happening in Iraq right now (by putting this story on the front page) is the confusion in Iraq over whether they should leave statues of Hussein standing or not. That’s probably a prett good indication that the troops are doing a good job killing Islamists if all the New York Times can write about is stupid statues.

    But Iraq the Model has the real news on how well the “surge” is working.

  • Governed by impudent children

    So the verdict is in; Pelosi travelling to glad-hand with Assad was stupid and possibly illegal according to the Washington Post, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal – but, hey, all of the Arabs say it was brave of her. Brave for what? Acting like a tool on the world stage? A tool of the Arabs and a tool of Code Pink and the other mindless drones in the anti-war movement who involuntarily blurt out “Bush Lies!”, “Bring the troops home!” and “Impeach Him!” as if they all had Tourette’s Syndrome.

    So what if she took a message to Assad from Israel that was just manufactured Bullcrap. What’s the big deal? And so what if she claims she confronted the Wahabis in Saudi Arabia about not having enough women in their legislature (yeah, I’ll believe that one – sounds like Hillary’s “I tried to join the Marines” story).  

    What has she done for the cause of peace in the Middle East? A big fat goose egg. Nuthin’. Nada. She got to spend more time than usual on camera while Congress is on break and not rewriting the defense bill that going to get veto’d. That’s it. 

    What’s happening back home? The Democrats are telling the Washington Times they’re not going to impeach the President;

    “The timing is all wrong,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat. “If this were the first two years of his administration I would advocate impeachment. A lot of people at home say impeachment, and I’m sure he committed a lot of impeachable offenses, but think about it practically.”

    Ok, Mr Waddler…oops, sorry, Nadler…what are those impeachable offenses? Name just one off the top of your fat head.

    Rep. Diane Watson, California Democrat, said she hears calls for impeachment from every crowd.
        “They say, ‘Democrats: Do something. Get Cheney, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales.’ They are saying impeachment. I am hearing that more and more and more,” said Ms. Watson.

    So, what’s the basis for impeachment? When Clinton was impeached, everyone in the country knew what the charges were – lying under oath. What did President Bush do? What has Cheney, Rove or Gonzales done?

    Apparently the people who take their time to talk and otherwise communicate with Democrat Congresspeople are morons and idiots who couldn’t tell the Constitution from constipation. Why don’t you tell your constituents that the President has to do something illegal, like Clinton did, before you can impeach him, dipstick.

    See, all of this is related, the trip to Syria and the mindless gumflapping here at home. This is just Democrats undermining the authority of this Administration to paralyze them – not for national security, not for policy reasons. Just pure political hackery. Like a bunch of little spoiled children who suddenly realized that they are just kids with no ideas, no means and no experience.

    They realize that the President has done the only thing that could have been done all along and they don’t have the gumption to tell their constituents or their paymasters.

    More on Pelosi’s Syria trip aftermath from Little Green Footballs.

  • Beating Dead Horses Week at WaPo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Curt at Flopping Aces has much more.

  • Just everybody shut up for a bit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Oh, those goofy Arabs

    It’s so nice that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is releasing those 15 British sailors and marines, but do we have to be treated to the theater he’s built up around it? For example, according to Fox News he lectured the British on sending a mother to his peninsula;

    “How can you justify seeing a mother away from her home, her children? Why don’t they respect family values in the West?” he asked of the British government.

    It’s much better to stone your women to death, beat them and cut off parts of their anatomy. Now that’s family values.

    Across the plains, Nancy Pelosi was meeting with Bassar Assad, who promised peace in our time;

    “We were very pleased with the assurances we received from the president that he was ready to resume the peace process. He’s ready to engage in negotiations for peace with Israel,” Pelosi said.

    She said the delegation conveyed to Assad “the importance of Syria’s role with Hamas in promoting peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

    She did not reveal how Assad responded to the delegation’s message on Hamas and Hezbollah. Syria hosts the exiled leadership of Hamas, as well as other Palestinian radical groups, and is a major patron of Hezbollah.

    I’m sure she didn’t reveal the reaction because 1) she didn’t dare mention Hamas or Hezbollah for fear of pissing off her allies in the region; or 2) Assad told her to shut up and she quickly complied.

    But while the United States regards Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups, Syria insists that Hamas is a legitimate resistance movement working for Palestinian freedom and Hezbollah is a regular Lebanese political party.

    I’m sure Pelosi agreed with Ashad that Hezbollah is just a political party and influenced Ashad to ship some of their spare missiles to Howard Dean so the Democrats could model themselves after Hezbollah.

    Syria has praised Pelosi for defying the White House. The state-run Syria Times called her a “brave lady” and Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem was quoted as saying Pelosi and other members of Congress were “welcome” in Syria.

    There ya go – when a State-sponsor of terrorism praises your member of Congress, stand proud. I say we send a whole butt-load of them over there.

    Of course not to be outdone by Pelosi cavorting with a bunch of Ay-rabs, Fox news Channel reports that the House Armed Services Committee sent a “style guide” out for the Pentagon so they don’t confuse the linguine-spined Democrats who have to talk to hard-ass warrior-types;

     “When referencing military operations throughout the world, please be as specific as possible. Please avoid using colloquialisms such as, ‘the war on terrorism, or the ‘Long War’ Please do not use the term ‘global war on terrorism,’ ” according to the memo.

    [Republican John] Boehner accused Democrats of launching an “absurd effort to deny the fact that America is battling terrorism on a global scale,” according to a statement released Wednesday by his office.

    So gutless PC-speak has infiltrated the Congressional hearings. See the style guide in .pdf. Boehner sums it up nicely;

    “It’s no wonder Democrats don’t like the phrases ‘global War on Terror,’ they have completely failed to take the threat of global terrorism seriously,” Boehner said.

    Or anything else for that matter.